First off, they are administrative rules, and have no force of law and are not enforceable in any way.
Ok, but do you know that they don't have to have force of law in order to change how examiners evaluate patents? This is confirmed by Dennis Crouch of Patently-O:
The 18-page guidelines do not have the force of law, but will impact how examiners judge obviousness in practice.
According to the 2007 Guidelines, however, in addition to TSM there came into being with KSR six other tests for obviousness. These tests gave the examiners six new ways to reject claims and so help achieve the reduction in the patent allowance rate which was such an important goal for the PTO under its then-Director, Jon Dudas. [...] In the 2010 Guidelines, however, only two of the new tests for obviousness appear to survive.
And...
This is in line with the general trend of the PTO under Director Kappos to [...] and give applicants greater opportunities to obtain allowance of claims.
In the 2010 Guidelines, however, only two of the new tests for obviousness appear to survive.
and
This is in line with the general trend of the PTO under Director Kappos to [...] and give applicants greater opportunities to obtain allowance of claims.
If I want to be able to ask companies in the future to delete data about me, that means they have to keep that data clearly labelled as being about me.
Otherwise, they could "anonymise" it by removing my name, but that's not real anonymity. If my mobile phone operator removes my name, but keeps the info about what house Customer0001 spends the night in and what office Customer0001 spend 40 hours of daytime in, Monday to Friday, well, there's only one person in the world that fits Customer0001's profile.:-/
The HTML is generated by Mediawiki, so I can't change that without patching the code (and the sys admins wouldn't be too happy with having to maintain a patch for each upgrade).
Thanks. (and also to the anonymous poster just below.)
Thing is, I want text-links in the articles to have a grey background when someone hovers the mouse over them, but the only way I know to do this is by having all link-things turn fully grey backgrounded whenever the mouse is over them.
The image in the top left is part of a big link area, so the whole link area turns grey.
It irritates me too. Anyone know the html/css magic needed?
It's also an example for how we can do our software patents lobbying.
The US govt pleading for a narrowing of patentable subject matter is rare (AFAIK), so this is a juicy example of how they justify a narrowing and how, in legal terms, they argue for a narrow interpretation.
I was just reading the patent. It's a strange one. I can't see any difference between claims #2 and #3.
It seems to be a software patent. The hardware elements claimed are all non-innovative.
I've started a wiki page for it here. Not sure if this will turn into an article about the court case or about the patent, but this case seems to provide interesting examples of a few topics.
> Surely online casinos have been doing this since forever?
Maybe, but this patent covers *a specific* implementation of virtual currency. Invalidating or avoiding it will require reading the claims, not the name or the abstract.
Many people can see that this is something that will be a key element of future society. It's just a matter of patenting as many related ideas now and waiting for them to come into use.
You can invalidate one claim (as it was written) by submitting prior art about that claim.
"as it was written" because the patent holder gets the chance to reword that claim and resubmit.
Invalidating one claim can solve your problems, but patents are written like thickets, so there are often many claims that cover a real world product.
1. A big box 2. The machine from claim #1, with a tap 3. The machine from claim #1, with a basin 4. The machine from claim #2, connected to tubing 5. The machine from claim #4, where the tubing is waterproof 6....
When you build a house or a petrol pump and someone says you infringe a patent, it's usually more than one claim.
Partial invalidation is possible, and might be enough to solve your problem, but it's a broad task. It's not the "Hey, this looks like the thing I saw in 2003" task that many people think it is.
Yep. He's looking for prior art that pre-dates him, and he's asking how to prove and attribute prior art to someone.
For this, there are some real common mistakes to avoid: * You have to find prior art for the claims, not the summary * You have to find prior art for *all* the claims * Good news is that acceptable forms of prior art include ads, manuals, magazine articles...
It's not rocket science, but a lot of news stories like this end up wasting people's energy because people contribute their knowledge without knowing these simple rules, and it's all or mostly useless.
As someone who's spent time scraping slashdot stories with 200+ comments for possible *useful* prior art, I can tell you that a lot of people don't know these basic rules.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks. That's always the right thing to do when there seems to be an error.
This lawsuit is about copyright *and* patents, so I've further edited the wiki to mention patents again.
Rustling up a quick summary here for anyone looking for background:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Oracle_v._SAP_(2010,_USA)
I'm a layperson, and you're a layperson, and we disagree. Fine.
But here are two articles by patent lawyers, and they support TFA's assertions:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Raising_examination_standards_won't_fix_much#Current_trend:_standards_getting_lower.3F
Commenter says:
Ok, but do you know that they don't have to have force of law in order to change how examiners evaluate patents? This is confirmed by Dennis Crouch of Patently-O:
http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/09/uspto-guidelines-for-determining-obviousness.html
Hope that helps.
Here's why TFA summary seems to be correct:
From http://www.ipeg.eu/blog/?p=1742
And...
And Patently-O says that these guidelines do affect patent granting/rejection: http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/09/uspto-guidelines-for-determining-obviousness.html
If anyone wants to explain that those sites called it wrong, I'm all ears.
So, why does ipeg.eu say:
and
?
Much better than the other permissive licences:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patent_clauses_in_software_licences#Apache_License
If I want to be able to ask companies in the future to delete data about me, that means they have to keep that data clearly labelled as being about me.
Otherwise, they could "anonymise" it by removing my name, but that's not real anonymity. If my mobile phone operator removes my name, but keeps the info about what house Customer0001 spends the night in and what office Customer0001 spend 40 hours of daytime in, Monday to Friday, well, there's only one person in the world that fits Customer0001's profile. :-/
Got it. Here's what worked:
#p-logo a:hover {background: none; background-repeat: no-repeat;}
The HTML is generated by Mediawiki, so I can't change that without patching the code (and the sys admins wouldn't be too happy with having to maintain a patch for each upgrade).
Thanks. (and also to the anonymous poster just below.)
Maybe someone can help with that css problem.
Thing is, I want text-links in the articles to have a grey background when someone hovers the mouse over them, but the only way I know to do this is by having all link-things turn fully grey backgrounded whenever the mouse is over them.
The image in the top left is part of a big link area, so the whole link area turns grey.
It irritates me too. Anyone know the html/css magic needed?
The current css is at:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Common.css
(Normal users can't edit that page but you could leave a note on its Talk: page)
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Oracle#ATG_patents_acquired
It's also an example for how we can do our software patents lobbying.
The US govt pleading for a narrowing of patentable subject matter is rare (AFAIK), so this is a juicy example of how they justify a narrowing and how, in legal terms, they argue for a narrow interpretation.
If anyone has info about these angles, please add it to what I've got here:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Excluding_gene_patents_in_the_USA
They can try my megaviagra*, if they don't mind walking in tripod mode for the next twelve hours.
(Who'd a thunk it, the spam is all true!)
I was just reading the patent. It's a strange one. I can't see any difference between claims #2 and #3.
It seems to be a software patent. The hardware elements claimed are all non-innovative.
I've started a wiki page for it here. Not sure if this will turn into an article about the court case or about the patent, but this case seems to provide interesting examples of a few topics.
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/US7035281
(I'm working on it now, but have to shutdown very soon. Should get to flesh it out tomorrow.)
Strange.
I wonder why the Belgian paper credited www.thespoof.com with the story.
Now that I search that site for "crocodile" and "congo", I only find this story:
http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s3i84966
(which is a childish "spoof" about the pilot being in the jacuzzi at the time...)
> Surely online casinos have been doing this since forever?
Maybe, but this patent covers *a specific* implementation of virtual currency. Invalidating or avoiding it will require reading the claims, not the name or the abstract.
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/How_to_read_patents
It's like the IPv6 problem.
Many people can see that this is something that will be a key element of future society. It's just a matter of patenting as many related ideas now and waiting for them to come into use.
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Webpage_and_web_service_patents
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Invalid_patents_remain_unchallenged
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patent_trolls
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Divine_e-commerce_patents
> The Pentagon maintained that releasing these documents represented a danger to US troops
Yeh, but the last time they said that, they lied:
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/10/17/170227
Great. Thanks for the info. I've added it to the wiki:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Equitable_defences:_estoppel_and_laches#Laches
You can invalidate one claim (as it was written) by submitting prior art about that claim.
"as it was written" because the patent holder gets the chance to reword that claim and resubmit.
Invalidating one claim can solve your problems, but patents are written like thickets, so there are often many claims that cover a real world product.
1. A big box ...
2. The machine from claim #1, with a tap
3. The machine from claim #1, with a basin
4. The machine from claim #2, connected to tubing
5. The machine from claim #4, where the tubing is waterproof
6.
When you build a house or a petrol pump and someone says you infringe a patent, it's usually more than one claim.
Partial invalidation is possible, and might be enough to solve your problem, but it's a broad task. It's not the "Hey, this looks like the thing I saw in 2003" task that many people think it is.
Yep. He's looking for prior art that pre-dates him, and he's asking how to prove and attribute prior art to someone.
For this, there are some real common mistakes to avoid:
* You have to find prior art for the claims, not the summary
* You have to find prior art for *all* the claims
* Good news is that acceptable forms of prior art include ads, manuals, magazine articles...
It's not rocket science, but a lot of news stories like this end up wasting people's energy because people contribute their knowledge without knowing these simple rules, and it's all or mostly useless.
As someone who's spent time scraping slashdot stories with 200+ comments for possible *useful* prior art, I can tell you that a lot of people don't know these basic rules.
s/CNN/Fox/
The story originated from a site called www.thespoof.com!
CNN isn't the only agency to publish this one. Here's a Belgian paper which published it, and even mentioned that they found it on www.thespoof.com:
http://www.lalibre.be/actu/international/article/618724/un-crocodile-de-quatre-metres-cache-dans-un-sac-a-la-base-d-un-accident-d-avion-au-congo.html
(I guess they can excuse themselves because there's the language barrier.)
Please read how to do it right:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/How_to_read_patents_and_gather_prior_art
Actually, since this problem is sure to boom in the coming months, I've started a wiki page for it:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/IPv6