The number of the Progress Bar patent in Europe is EP394160. I'm not sure if it's still in force, as I think I heard somewhere that the proprietor had chosen not to pay the renewal fee. But even if that should be the case, it's still a good example of a patent that the EPO granted, and that would become legalized if the patent lobby has its way.
But Stallman is incorrect as well.
By drafting 'literary claims' he insinuates that something like this would ever exist. That will never be the case.
There is a US firm of patent agents that are already trying to promote the idea of literary patents at http://www.plotpatents.com/ . So how can you say with such certainty that they will never exists?
Perhaps you should read up a little on the subject before you start declaring your views as absolute truths.
And yes, patents do cover ideas. That's the whole point with them. As opposed to copyright, which covers the expression of ideas.
Please feel free to Google for more background information before making you next post. Perhaps you will want to start with something that Dr. Stallman has written. He appears to be considerably more well informed on the subject than you.
The EU Parliament, however insignificant it often remains within the current EU legislative framework, is still the most important and powerful ally the opponents of the [software patents] have.
Yes, you're quite right. The amended proposal that the Parliament adopted in September 2003 is essentially what the FFII has been fighting for ever since.
But the problem is just that: that when the elected politicians in Parliament want one thing, and the non-elected EU officials want the opposite, it's just the beginning of a long fight. And it appears that the non-elected side will win.
When most of the power passes to people that don't have to worry about elections, that's a real problem. To an elected politician, the knowledge that he may have to explain his actions to ordinary citizens in the next election is the only counter-balance we have against the influence of all the US-funded corporate lobbyists in Brussels. For the non-elected, there is no such counter-balance.
And if my fellow Dutchmen (and the French) hadn't dismissed the EU Constitution, the EU Parliament would have gained a lot of strength vis-à-vis the Commission and the Council, and it would have been in a far better position to stop this kind of legislation in the future.
No, actually not.
Although this is one of the most widely used arguments for the (now dead) proposed constitution, it unfortunately isn't true.
The alleged strengthening of the Parliament(s) consisted of three major pieces:
The European Parliament would get a say in areas that had earlier been outside its domain, in particular agriculture.
More things would be decided according to the "co-decision procedure", which is the one that gives the EP the most influence.
National parliaments would get an increased role, by getting a chance to express their opinions about policical agreements that had been reached in the Council of Ministers, before they were formally adopted as "common positions".
Sounds great, sure. But by looking at what we've learned from the fight against software patents, we can see that there is very little substance in it.
To start with item no 2, the Software Patents Directive already is handled under the co-decision procedure. But thanks to the voting rules in the Parliament's second reading, where an absolute majority is required to overrule the non-elected Council, it is very difficult indeed for Parliament to make its opinions count. So that argument for the constitution is mostly a smokescreen.
If we then look at item no 3, it's even more of an empty gesture. Those who have been following the swpat issue know that when several national parliaments tried to express their concerns with the Council's "political agreement" of May 2004, they were just brushed aside and told that it was not possible to change it even if a majority of countries wanted to, and that the formal passing of the "common position" was indeed just a formality. So this argument seems to be more of an outright lie than a mere exaggeration.
And in view of this, the first item on the list of arguments for the proposed constitution doesn't impress very much either. Sure, it's an outrage that the entire agricultural subsidies budget is outside the control of the EP, and it would have been good to change that. But unless the parliamentarians have the power to actually influence the issues that they handle, what good would it do to let them aimlessly discuss them while the decisions are taken elsewhere?
For this reason, I'm glad that the French and Dutch citizens have managed to halt the process at least for the moment, to give Europe a time for reflection.
But even if we do in fact some day get a European Union that is governed in a reasonably democratic way, it will of course be too late for the software patents issue.
Their documentation as compared to other hardware/software developers has always encouraged the user to learn about and extend the environment in which they work rather than supporting only a superficial "click here, then there" mentality.
Digital Equipment's documentation for the OpenVMS system was also very good. For each major subject they had both a reference manual that listed things in alphabetical order, and a tutorial that gave you an introduction and explained the underlying concepts.
And there was lots of it: the documentation for OpenVMS was at least 10 or 15 feet in the bookshelf. Absolutely great.
It is mentioned in the article that IBM hopes that they will be able to make a contribution back by introducing some of their techniques and practices into the Open Source world. If there is one area where I really hope they succeed, it is if they were to inspire people to spend more time on documentation.
After all, what good is a program that does exactly what you want, if you can't find out that it exists and how it works by surfing the net? If I have to download and unpack something just to see if there happens to be some more or less cryptic files that I can read to see if it was worth downloading and unpacking, the chances are very slim that I'm gonna bother. And I think many people are like me in this respect.
Leaving aside the fact that there is really no excuse why they didn't put together a decent command line shell 20 years ago.
Why didn't they just look at what was available elsewhere, and copy the VMS shell (which Digital released for the VAX machines in 1978)? Clean, simple, and with command and option names that are actually possible to remember.
One of the most advertised aspects when Windows NT came out was that it was "designed by the people who wrote VMS". If this was true, does anyone know why they forgot to include the only part of VMS that's actually visible to normal users?
Sorry for ranting. I really loved the VMS command line.:-)
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
[emphasis added]
In the page with comments about various licenses you can compare what it says about the Original BSD License (free, incompatible with the GPL) and the Modified BSD License (free, compatible with the GPL). The difference between these two was an "obnoxious advertising clause", much like the one in the Microsoft Patent License.
The World Intellectual Property Organization WIPO is hosting an online discussion about "Intellectual Property in the Information Society" from June 1 to 15, 2005.The conclusions of the Online Forum will form part of WIPO's contribution to the WSIS Tunis Summit.
If you have any comments about file sharing, copyright enforcement, etc. (and who hasn't?), this may be a good place to post them.
Finish reading, numnuts.
[...]
[B]asically, the license grants you perpetual rights to read or write 'their' schema so long as you don't sue them for patent infringement, and you do display their blurb in your source and docs. You can't sublicense 'their' schema, but no problem, other can get the same license you got, simply by attaching the blurb.
Looks a lot like the *more* free BSD license!
This is not at all similar to the BSD license. In particular, the Microsoft patent licence is incompatible with the GPL since it:
Contains an advertising clause
Doesn't allow you to sublicense the patents
...and probably a host of other reasons as well.
So I don't think it's the grandparent post, which pointed out that Microsoft is positioning itselves to try to keep it's monopoly through the use of software patents, who is the "numnut".
Am I the only one who thinks this sounds an awful lot like a combinations of Hitler's Diaries from the eighties and the more recent Priory of Sion hoax?
Top secret documents mysteriously discovered in forgotten archives! History as we know it must be revised! Read all about it, etc.
For all I know, the document found could of course be both genuine and significant. But when it sounds a little to good to be true,...
Actually, they aren't bad for Nokia, or any large software company. Software patents will not stop large software companies in the list bit. When they are sued by another large software company (think Sun and IBM), they will simply sign a cross-licensing agreement.
True, when a big company comes into conflict with the patents of another big company, that's usually what happens.
But when a company like Nokia gets attacked by a patent profiteer, that only has a patent and doesn't make any products, then the big company has to pay up. Since the profiteer is not producing anything (except lawsuits), Nokia can't threaten to counter-sue. So they have to pay --- one percent, two percent, whatever the patent profiteer fancies, actually. Perhaps it won't kill a company like Nokia, but it certainly won't help their bottom line either.
A well known case is Acacia, which is a firm consisting entirely of patent lawyers, that has a patent on the idea of sending video over a computer network. Acacia's standard licence terms are to ask for 2% of the other company's turnover (regardless of how much of the revenues come from products that have anything to do with the video patent).
I wonder what Nokia's shareholders will say when they find out that Nokia's own patent lawyers have been lobbying hard for EU legislation that will make Acacia's patent enforceable in Europe.
2% of Nokia's turnover is a lot of money.
But perhaps mobile phones with cameras will go out of style anyway...
Aren't trademarks only there to protect a certain brand from being used by others in similar types of industry?
Yes, that's correct.Trademarks are divided into 45 different classes of goods and services. The system is called the "Nice Classification", since the original version of it was agreed on at some conference in Nice, France. This system is nowadays used in almost all countries in the world.
Under normal circumstances, marks in different classes are allowed to co-exists even if they are identical. For marks that are not entirely identical but merely very similar, like "Spam" vs. "SpamArrest", even more so.
For really well known marks, like Coca-Cola or IBM, there is an exception to this rule, which is called "Kodak protection" after the landmark case that is considered to have established the principle.
But in this case, where the original "Spam" trademark is so strongly tied to just one very specific product, I'd be very surprised if a court would find the "Spam" should enjoy Kodak protection. It's also quite debatable if "Spam" was ever that famous.
And even if there was a time when it could perhaps be argued that "Spam" was more frequently used to denote the "food" product, nowadays the meaning "junk email" is so widely established that I can't see how the owners of the origial "Spam" trademark could hope to be successful in their claims.
But perhaps they have some reasons for trying to pursue what to me looks like a very weak case indeed.
IANATML, but I've worked in the trademarks business for 25 years developing phonetic trademark search systems.
You, my friend, have just presented a very eloquent definition of Fascism.
I'm very sorry if I offended anybody, that most certainly wasn't my intention. I consider myself a great friend of the US, and as a European, I have every reason to be grateful to the US for having saved us from both fascism and communism during the 20th century.
But the way I see it, friends tell friends when they think they're making bad choices.
And unfortunately, I'm very concerned about the choices that US decision makers seem to be making in IP related matters these days.
[A]ll the grunt work will be done offshore, including programming, but the IP will be owned here in the US.
That's why they're pushing so hard for these laws, it's the very basis of the new economy.
That's a very insightful analysis. To the extent that the upper echlons in the US society actually have any coherent strategic vision for the future, I agree that's probably it.
But the problem is that it's only going to work as long as the rest of the world plays along, and is prepared to both introduce and enforce the draconian IP legislation that the US is pushing for on all fronts.
Right now, perhaps it looks promising (from this perspective). Under the threat of trade sanctions, China is agreeing to take measures to reduce piracy of music, films, and software. Thanks to massive US-led lobbying in Brussels, the European Union may be on the brink of legalizing software patents, that will make it illegal to treat email addresses as objects or send video over a network without paying royalties to a US company.
If you look at the US as a single entity (and
ignore the question of how the wealth will be distributed inside the US society), you may get the impression that pieces are falling into place, and that the strategy will be successful. This would then mean that the US could continue to run its massive trade defecit with the rest of the world, and make up the difference by collecting what would in effect be a global "IP tax".
But would a situation like that be sustainable? I think not.
If a small country on its own tries to defy the US over IP matters, it will be hit hard by trade sanctions and - utimately - the threat of military intervention.
But suppose Europe, China, India, and Brazil, and anybody else who cares to join the alliance, were to abolish the excesses in IP legislation once they realize that it only benefits a few US multinational companies. What could the US do about it?
The military option just wouldn't be an option in a scenario like that. Although it's not entirely unthinkable that the US has the military capacity to actually conquer the rest of the world, there's simply no way to sustain the necessary occupation forces indefinitely.
And trade santions wouldn't work either, since the rest of the world is much bigger than the US in economic terms.
That would just be like the classic line "fog over the Channel, Europe isolated".
Which, incidentally, is a quote that stems from the days when the British Empire was the undisputed no 1, but was already on the decline, even if nobody had noticed it yet.
Patent lawyers are no legal experts, they are technicians.
The parent post was modded as "troll", but I'm quite sure that it was meant to be informative, even if the wording was slightly unfortunate.
Most patent professionals, whether they work at the Patent Office or for a firm of private patent agents, do in fact have their basic training in engineering rather than in law. The idea has always been that the difficult part of the job is to be able to understand the technical aspects of the inventions, and to be sufficiently familiar with the technological field in question to be able to determine if an invention is indeed new, non-obvious etc.
So the traditional way of recruiting new people in the patent sector always has been to hire an engineer, and give him on the job training for the legal stuff he needs to know. This is different from how it works in for example trademarks, where (nowadays) most new recruits would have a law degree under their belt before they start working at the Patent Office, or for a patent and trademark agent.
But at least for now, most of the people that you would spontaneously call "patent lawyers" aren't in fact lawyers at all, but engineers or technicians that have taken a side course in patent law.
Language like this is already present in the European Patent Convention. It says:
The following in particular shall not be regarded as inventions:
[...]
aesthetic creations;
[...] programs for computers
Quite right. As you point out, both computer programs and aesthetic creations (books, films, etc.) are explicitly excluded from patentability in the European Patent Convention.
But the funny thing is how the patent lawyers interpret this exclusion. When it comes to aesthetic creations, they all agree that you can't get a patent on them, because of this wording in the EPC.
But when it comes to computer programs, they claim that the law as written doesn't apply any more. Even though both films and computer programs are part of the same list in the same article in the same international convention.
For a slightly humorous text that explores this inconsistency, and the "as such" loophole in paticular, read Why Can't I Patent My Movie?
We had a good idea, and only needed a couple million to design the software right so that it could scale as the idea got more popular.
Apparently, the limitied capital requirements you describe would be typical for new companies in the software industry. Compared to other businesses, such as manufacturing or hardware development or whatever, you simply don't need as much money.
So while getting 10M$ on a silver plate would of course be a cause for celebration for the recipient, it would normally be very difficult for a software company in its early stages to find ways of spending it productively, so that you can actually get any return on the investment.
In the article Software patents and financial investing venture capitlist Laura Creighton explains how it typically works. (The article is is mostly about software patents, but covers the topic of investing in software companies as well.)
An extract from the article:
Hardware companies need capital, indeed, to build factories, but the
demands of Software companies are much more modest. The following is
the normal development pattern of small software companies, who intend
to produce a product for retail.
A few -- at
most 5 -- people get together to form a company and develop a piece of
software. They look for funding. Unless some of the founders have rich
parents, they receive none -- because they cannot convince the lenders
to lend. This is because all they have to offer is their very bright
idea. Ideas about the software I intend to develop are akin to ideas
about the hit-CD my band intends to produce, or the great novel I will
write some day. They sound great, but only rarely live up to their
dreams. In the Software industry, we have a word for such unrealised
dreams. We call them 'vapourware'. And financial lenders have learned
to not invest in 'vapourware', for obvious reasons.
Undiscouraged, our hero-founders decide to develop their software
anyway. In order to fund their venture, they take on a consulting
contract, typically in an unrelated, but lucrative field. This means
that their product gets developed more slowly than would otherwise be
the case. If all goes well, they reach the point where they would
dearly love to jettison the consulting business, and make all of their
income on business related to their new product. Or, if their
consulting business is related to their product, they need to expand.
In short, they need a round of financing. This is where I come
in. This is where I do my investing, and most small innovative
software companies need cash to the tune of 50,000 to 250,000
Euros. This is an incredibly small sum. There is a tremendous need for
this sort of funding, but it is very hard to find. And Software
Patents will not help you acquire this. The amount of money you need
to 'go around the corner' is one or two orders of magnitude smaller
than the amount of money that you need to open a factory. It is the
same problem that faces small businesses in every industry.
She goes on to explain how software patents were percieved by some to provide a solution to this problem, but how that perception turned out to be an expensive mirage calle "the Internet Bubble".
It's a long article, but an interesting read if you have the time.
Perhaps they should delay the switchover if they're not ready.
Oh, but "they" are as ready as they can be.
The driving force behind the legislation to abolish analog TV is the big media companies, who want to "plug the analog hole". That's why this is happening simultaneously in most of the industrialized world, despite the fact that no consumers have asked for it anywhere.
Their motive isn't to give you better quality pictures or (God forbid!) more choice. They want to force everybody to switch to digital because only digital technologies support strong DRM restrictions.
They can't retroactively change the court cases from the 70's that declared it legal to record TV shows on video for your own use. But by introducing new technology that makes it impossible to do so, they can make the legal point moot.
And by switching from analog to digial, they move away from the legal area where a reasonable balance has been struck between the interests of consumers and copyright holders, and into DMCA territory, where you're more or less classified as a terrorist if you even try to tamper with the copy protection.
The article speaks a lot of rubbish, but it raises one valid point as well.
To most end users, a consistent look and feel, that works right out of the box, is really important. So it's a very good thing that Linux distributions are improving in this area (which the article conveniently forgets to mention).
For the same reason, I also think it's good to see Open Source applications adopting user interfaces that are more similar to their Windows counterparts. It may annoy some old-time Unix or Linux users to find "Options" under "Tools" rather than under "Edit" in the Firefox browser.
But for Windows users that are looking for a safer alternative to their present browser, the chance that they'll make the switch increases with every item that works as expected when they first try it out.
And it's only by convincing today's Windows users to switch, that Linux can avoid the fate that the article spells out.
"louis vuiton" don't have trademark rights over that name, they have it over that name in the context of bags, fashion, perfume.
For a normal trademark, what you say is correct. Trademarks are divided into 45 different classes of goods and services. The system is called the "Nice Classification", since the original version of it was agreed on at some conference in Nice, France. This system is nowadays used in almost all countries in the world.
Under normal circumstances, a trademark can coexist with another identical one if they are in different classes. A mark that is registered for bags and fashion and perfume would not be in conflict with the same mark for completely unrelated products, like cars or building materials or telecommunication services.
But if a mark is sufficiently well known, it gets a wider protection because it's "famous". The protection will then be extended to unrelated products as well.
There is nothing fishy about the fact that the really well known marks get this special treatment. It's called "Kodak protection" after a landmark case that is considered to have established the principle, and is completely above board.
Withoug being much of an expert on ladies' handbags, I assume that Louis Voiton would be considered "famous" by the court. They would then in fact have the trademark rights to the word in the context of any goods.
The same of course applies to Coca-Cola, which another poster mentioned.
IANATML, but I worked with computer programs for doing phonetic similarity searches on trademarks for 25 years, so I'm resonably familiar with the area.
That's my impression as well, but this is Slashdot, so don't expect any definitive answers on a subject like that.
Uhh... Gee, Crystalline structures couldn't possibly have anything to do with the shape of the atoms/molecules and how they bond together. Naaaaah, [...]
Yes, of course they do, but you're missing the point. For complex molecules like proteins there are, apparently, a gazillion different ways that they could theoretically fold together and form crystals, if I understand it correctly. All of these potential variants would be just as feasible considering the shapes and electrical charges and whatever of the underlying atoms. But yet, out of all the possibilities that the protein molecule has to chose from, if you just look at the restraints that the underlying systems provide, it always picks the same one (according to Dr. Sheldrake reporting stuff that everbody in the field evidently agrees on). Why is that?
This is the question that the hypothesis suggests an answer to. He's not suggesting that you can transform the cells in you body into diamonds by just concentrating on a morphic field, or something. He's suggesting an interesting (and testable) explanation for how the proteins that your DNA made your cells produce knew that they should build you, instead of a fruit fly or an antiloop. And a whole lot of other things that involve self-organizing systems. And what's interesting about the hypothesis is that if it's true, it also provides a new perspective on a lot of ordinary macroscopic everyday phenomena.
I'm off to patent a morphic field generator!
The US Patent Office is not known for being too rigorous about their examinations, so good luck. Make sure you get it classified as a software patent, though. That minimizes the risk that it will exposed to any technical scrutiny at all, it appears.
To hear of Quantum Darwinism makes me think of Rupert Sheldrake. According to him, more or less everything that we normally think of as eternal natural laws is in fact just "habits" that nature has developed. While they are forming, before they get so engrained that they take on the appearance of immutable laws, they are subject to natural selection, much along the lines of Darwinism in the realm of biology. He calls this hypothesis the "Theory of Formative Causation".
According to the hypothesis, this would apply to complex systems on every level, from the formation of galaxies down to quantum mechanics, and everything in between. So Quantum Darwinism, if you want to call it that, would be a special case of the hypothesis.
I strongly recommend his book "The Presence of the Past" to anybody with half an interest these kinds on philosophical questions. If nothing else, it's a relief to read a book that verges on the metaphysical, but is still argued in a calm and scientific manner.
Q: Just so that everyone is familiar with your theoretical work, can you briefly define for us the basic intention behind, and the basic elements of, the theory of formative causation?
Sheldrake: The theory of formative causation is concerned with how things take up their forms, or patterns, or organization. So it covers the formation of galaxies, atoms, crystals, molecules, plants, animals, cells, societies. It covers all kinds of things that have forms, patterns, structures, or selforganizing properties.
You see, all these things organize themselves. An atom doesn't have to be put together by some external agency. It organizes itself. A molecule and a crystal are not assembled by human beings bit by bit, they spontaneously crystalize. Animals spontaneously grow. All these things are different from machines, which are artificially put together by human beings.
So, what my theory is concerned with is self-organizing natural systems, and it deals with the cause of form. And the cause of all these forms I take to be organizing fields, form-shaping fields, which I call morphic fields, from the Greek word for form. The original feature of what I'm saying is that the forms of societies, ideas, crystals and molecules depend on the way that previous ones of that kind have been organized. There's a kind of built-in memory in the morphic fields of each kind of thing. So the regularities of nature I think of as more like habits, than as things governed by eternal mathematical laws that somehow exist outside nature.
More links available through Google, unsurprisingly enough.
This may be only a temporary reprieve, but it could also, quite possibly, be a sign that the tides may be changing in the Council. Let's all hope for the best, and do what we can to make it happen.
Let's say you've been using Windows all this while - what would make you want to switch?
There are many good reasons to switch. You don't like viruses. You feel they're overcharging you. You're concerned about accessing your own documents in the future. You feel their licence terms are an insult. Or whatever.
Any of these reasons, or a host of others, might be enough to make somebody want to switch.
But just as important are the reasons for not switching.
And the single most important one is retraining costs. This applies just as much to individual home users as it does to large enterprises. It's a real pain to have to relearn things that you already knew, but now have to be done in a slightly different manner.
So if you can at least spread it out, by gradually switching to Open Source alternatives on the Windows platform, until you're finally ready to chuck out the OS as well, that's a great advantage.
(This post was written using the Mozilla browser on a Windows XP machine. I know where I'm going, but I'm not there yet.)
Slashdot Mirror
The progress bar patent is mentioned on FFII's Software Patents FAQ page.
In addition to the Webshop example, which other posters have mentioned, you can find some more examples here.
And don't forget Acacia's patent on streaming video, which is another good illustration of how software patents work in practice.
Perhaps you should read up a little on the subject before you start declaring your views as absolute truths.
And yes, patents do cover ideas. That's the whole point with them. As opposed to copyright, which covers the expression of ideas.
Please feel free to Google for more background information before making you next post. Perhaps you will want to start with something that Dr. Stallman has written. He appears to be considerably more well informed on the subject than you.
But the problem is just that: that when the elected politicians in Parliament want one thing, and the non-elected EU officials want the opposite, it's just the beginning of a long fight. And it appears that the non-elected side will win.
When most of the power passes to people that don't have to worry about elections, that's a real problem. To an elected politician, the knowledge that he may have to explain his actions to ordinary citizens in the next election is the only counter-balance we have against the influence of all the US-funded corporate lobbyists in Brussels. For the non-elected, there is no such counter-balance.
No, actually not.Although this is one of the most widely used arguments for the (now dead) proposed constitution, it unfortunately isn't true.
The alleged strengthening of the Parliament(s) consisted of three major pieces:
- The European Parliament would get a say in areas that had earlier been outside its domain, in particular agriculture.
- More things would be decided according to the "co-decision procedure", which is the one that gives the EP the most influence.
- National parliaments would get an increased role, by getting a chance to express their opinions about policical agreements that had been reached in the Council of Ministers, before they were formally adopted as "common positions".
Sounds great, sure. But by looking at what we've learned from the fight against software patents, we can see that there is very little substance in it.To start with item no 2, the Software Patents Directive already is handled under the co-decision procedure. But thanks to the voting rules in the Parliament's second reading, where an absolute majority is required to overrule the non-elected Council, it is very difficult indeed for Parliament to make its opinions count. So that argument for the constitution is mostly a smokescreen.
If we then look at item no 3, it's even more of an empty gesture. Those who have been following the swpat issue know that when several national parliaments tried to express their concerns with the Council's "political agreement" of May 2004, they were just brushed aside and told that it was not possible to change it even if a majority of countries wanted to, and that the formal passing of the "common position" was indeed just a formality. So this argument seems to be more of an outright lie than a mere exaggeration.
And in view of this, the first item on the list of arguments for the proposed constitution doesn't impress very much either. Sure, it's an outrage that the entire agricultural subsidies budget is outside the control of the EP, and it would have been good to change that. But unless the parliamentarians have the power to actually influence the issues that they handle, what good would it do to let them aimlessly discuss them while the decisions are taken elsewhere?
For this reason, I'm glad that the French and Dutch citizens have managed to halt the process at least for the moment, to give Europe a time for reflection.
But even if we do in fact some day get a European Union that is governed in a reasonably democratic way, it will of course be too late for the software patents issue.
And there was lots of it: the documentation for OpenVMS was at least 10 or 15 feet in the bookshelf. Absolutely great.
It is mentioned in the article that IBM hopes that they will be able to make a contribution back by introducing some of their techniques and practices into the Open Source world. If there is one area where I really hope they succeed, it is if they were to inspire people to spend more time on documentation.
After all, what good is a program that does exactly what you want, if you can't find out that it exists and how it works by surfing the net? If I have to download and unpack something just to see if there happens to be some more or less cryptic files that I can read to see if it was worth downloading and unpacking, the chances are very slim that I'm gonna bother. And I think many people are like me in this respect.
Why didn't they just look at what was available elsewhere, and copy the VMS shell (which Digital released for the VAX machines in 1978)? Clean, simple, and with command and option names that are actually possible to remember.
One of the most advertised aspects when Windows NT came out was that it was "designed by the people who wrote VMS". If this was true, does anyone know why they forgot to include the only part of VMS that's actually visible to normal users?
Sorry for ranting. I really loved the VMS command line. :-)
In the page with comments about various licenses you can compare what it says about the Original BSD License (free, incompatible with the GPL) and the Modified BSD License (free, compatible with the GPL). The difference between these two was an "obnoxious advertising clause", much like the one in the Microsoft Patent License.
If you have any comments about file sharing, copyright enforcement, etc. (and who hasn't?), this may be a good place to post them.
There are 10 different themes for discussion, including "Public domain and open information: at odds with the IP system or enabled by it?" and "Enforcement of IP rights in the digital environment".
Although it doesn't explcitly say so in the invitation, I assume that Slashdot readers are welcome to take part as well. But keep it clean :-)
So I don't think it's the grandparent post, which pointed out that Microsoft is positioning itselves to try to keep it's monopoly through the use of software patents, who is the "numnut".
Is that a word, by the way?
Top secret documents mysteriously discovered in forgotten archives! History as we know it must be revised! Read all about it, etc.
For all I know, the document found could of course be both genuine and significant. But when it sounds a little to good to be true,...
But when a company like Nokia gets attacked by a patent profiteer, that only has a patent and doesn't make any products, then the big company has to pay up. Since the profiteer is not producing anything (except lawsuits), Nokia can't threaten to counter-sue. So they have to pay --- one percent, two percent, whatever the patent profiteer fancies, actually. Perhaps it won't kill a company like Nokia, but it certainly won't help their bottom line either.
A well known case is Acacia, which is a firm consisting entirely of patent lawyers, that has a patent on the idea of sending video over a computer network. Acacia's standard licence terms are to ask for 2% of the other company's turnover (regardless of how much of the revenues come from products that have anything to do with the video patent).
I wonder what Nokia's shareholders will say when they find out that Nokia's own patent lawyers have been lobbying hard for EU legislation that will make Acacia's patent enforceable in Europe.
2% of Nokia's turnover is a lot of money.
But perhaps mobile phones with cameras will go out of style anyway...
Under normal circumstances, marks in different classes are allowed to co-exists even if they are identical. For marks that are not entirely identical but merely very similar, like "Spam" vs. "SpamArrest", even more so.
For really well known marks, like Coca-Cola or IBM, there is an exception to this rule, which is called "Kodak protection" after the landmark case that is considered to have established the principle.
But in this case, where the original "Spam" trademark is so strongly tied to just one very specific product, I'd be very surprised if a court would find the "Spam" should enjoy Kodak protection. It's also quite debatable if "Spam" was ever that famous.
And even if there was a time when it could perhaps be argued that "Spam" was more frequently used to denote the "food" product, nowadays the meaning "junk email" is so widely established that I can't see how the owners of the origial "Spam" trademark could hope to be successful in their claims.
But perhaps they have some reasons for trying to pursue what to me looks like a very weak case indeed.
IANATML, but I've worked in the trademarks business for 25 years developing phonetic trademark search systems.
But the way I see it, friends tell friends when they think they're making bad choices.
And unfortunately, I'm very concerned about the choices that US decision makers seem to be making in IP related matters these days.
But the problem is that it's only going to work as long as the rest of the world plays along, and is prepared to both introduce and enforce the draconian IP legislation that the US is pushing for on all fronts.
Right now, perhaps it looks promising (from this perspective). Under the threat of trade sanctions, China is agreeing to take measures to reduce piracy of music, films, and software. Thanks to massive US-led lobbying in Brussels, the European Union may be on the brink of legalizing software patents, that will make it illegal to treat email addresses as objects or send video over a network without paying royalties to a US company.
If you look at the US as a single entity (and ignore the question of how the wealth will be distributed inside the US society), you may get the impression that pieces are falling into place, and that the strategy will be successful. This would then mean that the US could continue to run its massive trade defecit with the rest of the world, and make up the difference by collecting what would in effect be a global "IP tax".
But would a situation like that be sustainable? I think not.
If a small country on its own tries to defy the US over IP matters, it will be hit hard by trade sanctions and - utimately - the threat of military intervention.
But suppose Europe, China, India, and Brazil, and anybody else who cares to join the alliance, were to abolish the excesses in IP legislation once they realize that it only benefits a few US multinational companies. What could the US do about it?
The military option just wouldn't be an option in a scenario like that. Although it's not entirely unthinkable that the US has the military capacity to actually conquer the rest of the world, there's simply no way to sustain the necessary occupation forces indefinitely.
And trade santions wouldn't work either, since the rest of the world is much bigger than the US in economic terms. That would just be like the classic line "fog over the Channel, Europe isolated".
Which, incidentally, is a quote that stems from the days when the British Empire was the undisputed no 1, but was already on the decline, even if nobody had noticed it yet.
Which probably isn't just a coincidence.
Most patent professionals, whether they work at the Patent Office or for a firm of private patent agents, do in fact have their basic training in engineering rather than in law. The idea has always been that the difficult part of the job is to be able to understand the technical aspects of the inventions, and to be sufficiently familiar with the technological field in question to be able to determine if an invention is indeed new, non-obvious etc.
So the traditional way of recruiting new people in the patent sector always has been to hire an engineer, and give him on the job training for the legal stuff he needs to know. This is different from how it works in for example trademarks, where (nowadays) most new recruits would have a law degree under their belt before they start working at the Patent Office, or for a patent and trademark agent.
Now, considering the quality of the prior art searches conducted by most patent offices before granting their one-click patents, as opposed to the advanced legal argumentation acrobatics required to claim that software can be patented even though the law explictly says that it can't, this may perhaps change in the future.
But at least for now, most of the people that you would spontaneously call "patent lawyers" aren't in fact lawyers at all, but engineers or technicians that have taken a side course in patent law.
But the funny thing is how the patent lawyers interpret this exclusion. When it comes to aesthetic creations, they all agree that you can't get a patent on them, because of this wording in the EPC.
But when it comes to computer programs, they claim that the law as written doesn't apply any more. Even though both films and computer programs are part of the same list in the same article in the same international convention.
For a slightly humorous text that explores this inconsistency, and the "as such" loophole in paticular, read Why Can't I Patent My Movie?
It's a funny world.
So while getting 10M$ on a silver plate would of course be a cause for celebration for the recipient, it would normally be very difficult for a software company in its early stages to find ways of spending it productively, so that you can actually get any return on the investment.
In the article Software patents and financial investing venture capitlist Laura Creighton explains how it typically works. (The article is is mostly about software patents, but covers the topic of investing in software companies as well.)
An extract from the article:
She goes on to explain how software patents were percieved by some to provide a solution to this problem, but how that perception turned out to be an expensive mirage calle "the Internet Bubble".It's a long article, but an interesting read if you have the time.
Oh, but "they" are as ready as they can be.
The driving force behind the legislation to abolish analog TV is the big media companies, who want to "plug the analog hole". That's why this is happening simultaneously in most of the industrialized world, despite the fact that no consumers have asked for it anywhere.
Their motive isn't to give you better quality pictures or (God forbid!) more choice. They want to force everybody to switch to digital because only digital technologies support strong DRM restrictions.
They can't retroactively change the court cases from the 70's that declared it legal to record TV shows on video for your own use. But by introducing new technology that makes it impossible to do so, they can make the legal point moot.
And by switching from analog to digial, they move away from the legal area where a reasonable balance has been struck between the interests of consumers and copyright holders, and into DMCA territory, where you're more or less classified as a terrorist if you even try to tamper with the copy protection.
I apologize for being so dystopian.
To most end users, a consistent look and feel, that works right out of the box, is really important. So it's a very good thing that Linux distributions are improving in this area (which the article conveniently forgets to mention).
For the same reason, I also think it's good to see Open Source applications adopting user interfaces that are more similar to their Windows counterparts. It may annoy some old-time Unix or Linux users to find "Options" under "Tools" rather than under "Edit" in the Firefox browser.
But for Windows users that are looking for a safer alternative to their present browser, the chance that they'll make the switch increases with every item that works as expected when they first try it out.
And it's only by convincing today's Windows users to switch, that Linux can avoid the fate that the article spells out.
Under normal circumstances, a trademark can coexist with another identical one if they are in different classes. A mark that is registered for bags and fashion and perfume would not be in conflict with the same mark for completely unrelated products, like cars or building materials or telecommunication services.
But if a mark is sufficiently well known, it gets a wider protection because it's "famous". The protection will then be extended to unrelated products as well.
There is nothing fishy about the fact that the really well known marks get this special treatment. It's called "Kodak protection" after a landmark case that is considered to have established the principle, and is completely above board.
Withoug being much of an expert on ladies' handbags, I assume that Louis Voiton would be considered "famous" by the court. They would then in fact have the trademark rights to the word in the context of any goods.
The same of course applies to Coca-Cola, which another poster mentioned.
IANATML, but I worked with computer programs for doing phonetic similarity searches on trademarks for 25 years, so I'm resonably familiar with the area.
This is great news!
But it's good news in whatever language :-)
Yes, of course they do, but you're missing the point. For complex molecules like proteins there are, apparently, a gazillion different ways that they could theoretically fold together and form crystals, if I understand it correctly. All of these potential variants would be just as feasible considering the shapes and electrical charges and whatever of the underlying atoms. But yet, out of all the possibilities that the protein molecule has to chose from, if you just look at the restraints that the underlying systems provide, it always picks the same one (according to Dr. Sheldrake reporting stuff that everbody in the field evidently agrees on). Why is that?
This is the question that the hypothesis suggests an answer to. He's not suggesting that you can transform the cells in you body into diamonds by just concentrating on a morphic field, or something. He's suggesting an interesting (and testable) explanation for how the proteins that your DNA made your cells produce knew that they should build you, instead of a fruit fly or an antiloop. And a whole lot of other things that involve self-organizing systems. And what's interesting about the hypothesis is that if it's true, it also provides a new perspective on a lot of ordinary macroscopic everyday phenomena.
The US Patent Office is not known for being too rigorous about their examinations, so good luck. Make sure you get it classified as a software patent, though. That minimizes the risk that it will exposed to any technical scrutiny at all, it appears.According to the hypothesis, this would apply to complex systems on every level, from the formation of galaxies down to quantum mechanics, and everything in between. So Quantum Darwinism, if you want to call it that, would be a special case of the hypothesis.
I strongly recommend his book "The Presence of the Past" to anybody with half an interest these kinds on philosophical questions. If nothing else, it's a relief to read a book that verges on the metaphysical, but is still argued in a calm and scientific manner.
Extract from an interwiew with Dr. Sheldrake:
More links available through Google, unsurprisingly enough.
This may be only a temporary reprieve, but it could also, quite possibly, be a sign that the tides may be changing in the Council. Let's all hope for the best, and do what we can to make it happen.
Any of these reasons, or a host of others, might be enough to make somebody want to switch. But just as important are the reasons for not switching.
And the single most important one is retraining costs. This applies just as much to individual home users as it does to large enterprises. It's a real pain to have to relearn things that you already knew, but now have to be done in a slightly different manner.
So if you can at least spread it out, by gradually switching to Open Source alternatives on the Windows platform, until you're finally ready to chuck out the OS as well, that's a great advantage.
(This post was written using the Mozilla browser on a Windows XP machine. I know where I'm going, but I'm not there yet.)