A precedent is only binding on courts beneath the one that sets the precedent. The court that sets the precedent can decide it differently the next time around.
However, judges will often take serious consideration of findings of other courts even if there are no binding precedents. As such, that decision could cause problems for other defendants.
The great thing is that we have a loooooot of land available for solar cells. Folks who live on the Eastern seaboard, or the Southern end of the West coast don't realize it, but the rest of the country has lots and lots of space.
In the community where I live, the population density is approximately 1.4 people per square mile. The community covers about 50 square miles and has a population of aobut 70.
The population density trails off a bit no matter which direction you go. For example, driving west from the western edge of the community, it's about 5 miles until you get to the next house. And I don't know that anyone has lived in that house since the mid or late 1970s. There are a couple of houses about 2 miles north of the northern edge of the community. To the east, it's about 6 or 7 miles. Since there aren't any public roads going directly east, you have to take a round about trip that is more like 15 or 20 miles around to get to a point 6 miles east. To the south, the next house is about three miles from the southern edge of the community and maybe seven homes within 10 miles of the southern edge of the community.
If they turn it down, they pay for their own attorney's fees.
How about if each side pays their own, but if one side requests arbitration and the other refuses, the one who refuses pays for the attorneys fees for both sides?
Perhaps a little research before filing the lawsuit would be useful.
My suggestion for how to make the situation better is to require the plaintiff in any lawsuit to pay the attorney's fees of the defendant.
If the plaintiff wins, then they could recover the fees they paid if the defendant had sufficient assets. If the defendant doesn't have the assets, then why is the plaintiff even suing him?
If the plaintiff requests arbitration and the defendant refuses, then the defendant would pay his own attorney's fees. If the defendant requests arbitration the the plaintiff refuses, then the plaintiff would be barred from recovering any of the attorney's fees from the defendant.
It would force the plaintiff to really do their homework before filing suit and to make a determination ahead of time about whether or not the lawsuit was justified. It would end the RIAA's practice of going after anyone and everyone without any knowledge about whether or not the defendant was the culprit.
I thought they were already here. I remember reading a multiplage newspaper story describing the technology while a grad student. That would place the time period as in the spring of 1980 or before.
In 1982, I had an idea that I described to a few people about using a CD to store aviation charts. The idea was to put a small display in an aircraft cockpit along with a small computer and using Loran radios to provide the current position to the computer so that it could display the location of the aircraft on the display for the pilot. Unfortunately, I didn't have any idea how to get the financial backing to try to produce the device. Now, of course, they have just that, but using GPS instead of Loran, and for far more than just aircraft. It would have never occurred to me to use them for cars.
In 1983, I wanted to store images of title records on CDs and had a customer of mine who was very interested in doing that. The customer was ready to foot the bill to send people to the local county courthouses where he did business to photograph the title records, page by page, for this purpose. But it never came around.
Later, in the early 1990's, my brother's company was publishing data on CDs and it cost quite a bit to write the data out every two weeks. He was going to buy a CD-writer so he could avoid sending them out to be done by an outside company. I think the cost to create the master at the time was $1,000. After that, pressing a few hundred CDs was not too bad. I advised him to wait a little while for the cost of the CD writer to decline in price from about $50,000 each. He bought his first CD writer for about $4,000 a year or so later.
Early on, I figured the audio CD players would never catch on unless they could bring them under $200 each. So I watched the newspapers and when one sold for $199.50 or so, I went to the store and bought one. At the time, everyone was fascinated by the idea that you could scratch them without affecting the sound. So every demo CD in the store had scratches across the bottom as people would test that out for themselves.
At that time, I lived near a large record shop. Their entire selection of CDs were on a table in the store that was about 3 ft by 3 ft and had plenty of empty space on top. Sure enough, they caught on and CDs really began to replace records in the store about a year or two later.
If the rich individual or company refused arbitration, then they would take over their own attorney's fees. The arbitration, of course, would have to be in a timely matter.
Anyone dragging the suit out should have to pay the attorney's fees for both sides.
I'm of the opinion that in a lawsuit, the plaintiff and his lawyers should be required to pay the defendant's attorneys as well. Only if the plaintiff wants to take it to arbitration and the defendant refuses, should the defendant be required to pay his own attorney's fees.
If the plaintiff wins, the judge should be able to award him the legal fees, but only in a limited number of situations.
If it is a trade secret, wouldn't they really only be able to file a lawsuit (well, win a lawsuit) against someone who had never signed an agreement to keep it secret?
I know nothing about the particulars of thise case. If it is being leaked prior to being sent to the publications, then there is a good chance it is an employee who leaked it in violation of agreements they would undoubtedly be required to sign.
If it is being leaked by an employee of a publication, unless that employee had signed some confidentiality agreement with them, just what could they do about it? At best, it would seem like the only thing they could do is bring a lot of pressure on the publication to fire the employee.
If it was leaked once it was sent to a publication, they could narrow it down by providing each publication a version of the ad with a very slight difference and then look at the leaked versions to see which variation was used, and thus, from which publication it was leaked. I wonder if they tried this.
There is a time for troll or flamebait, but the terms are as likely to be used wrong by moderators who really don't understand the meaning of the terms or who were ignorant of the facts and assumed that the poster was trolling when they actually made an interesting and on-topic comment.
If you have a legal copy of a current song, you can sell that specific copy
That is precisely why I said: "you can sell it" instead of "you can sell copies of it".
The Ford Mustang analogy is not on-point. The First Sale Doctrine in copyright law specifically talks about recordings. I'm have no idea how much of a car is covered by copyright law at all. At least the design documents. Maybe even the basic design.
Under the First Sale Doctrine, you are explicitly permitted to sell a copyrighted work you have purchased even if the copyright holder objects. There are some limitations for a "restored copyright". As I understand it, the "restored copyright" is when the copyright expired and then became available again when the copyright term was extended.
So if you have a legal copy of a current song, you can sell it to someone else.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. If you want legal advice, find a real lawyer.
I think it depends on what kind of person you want to come back from prison after his term is over. The way we generally do it, it is a wonder that the recividism rate is not much, much higher because the prisoners aren't rehabilitated much at all.
If you want a prisoner to come out who is neither predator nor preyed upon and who is ready to rejoin society in a responsible manner, then their prison sentences need to be spent in a way that furthers that goal. That means that their prison life needs to be as close to normal as possible. That includes education and job training to enable them to live productively on the outside.
I really don't think anyone should be released from jail or prison until they at least have a GED.
Make prison life reasonably normal instead of a concrete jungle with life threatening dangers at every turn and you will save a lot of money as well because of the reduction in the costs of keeping a prisoner there and because of a lower recividsm rate afterwards.
People are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment.
The instrument that I'm trying to patent will cost well over 40 million to build. I'm suppose to simply give one to the patent office? Who pays for that? Does the patent office fund the design, development, and fabrication of this device so that they can stick one on a shelf? Is there anyone at the patent office qualified to test my instrument to make sure it works? Do they have the equipment necessary to test the device?
Once proved to be workable, the applicant would get to keep it. The point is to see that it works, not to create a museum. In fact, the patent examiner could visit the applicants work site to see the device -- it wouldn't have to be done in the patent office itself.
As I understand it, applicants used to be required to submit a working model of the invention. I think that rule was removed because of the storage space required.
Of course there is not enough information to actually build one! The patent office is in no way qualified to come close to assessing this.
Patents MUST be enabling. If they are not enabling, they are not to be granted. It is up to the patent office to determine whether or not there is sufficient detail in the patent in order to build it.
In other words, you cannot patent anything and keep it secret at the same time. For the patent to be granted, you must have provided to anyone reading the patent all the information needed to build it. Once the patent expires, your competitors will have no trouble building the invention no matter how complex or unobvious it is because you already provided to them in the application everything they need to build the invention.
Choose a person of ordinary skill to build one???"
I didn't say "a person of ordinary skill". I said "a person of ordinary skill in the art". There is a big difference in the two and the phrase "a person of ordinary skill in the art" is, to the best of my understanding, a commonly used term in determining whether or not a patent is enabling. At least, in just about every serious discussion on the subject that I've read, heard, or been involved in, the phrase has been used.
"A person of ordinary skill in the art" is a person with training in whatever field the patent is in. For example, a patent on a radar circuit must contain enough detail that any competent electrical engineer had better be able to build it using his regular electrical engineering skills and the details provided in the patent. He does not need to have any special knowledge that a normal electrical engineer would not have. On the other hand, the patent would not usually provide sufficient detail for a normal high school spanish teacher to build the radar circuit.
If "a person of ordinary skill in the art" cannot build the invention from the description given in the patent, then the patent is certinly not enabling and therefore should never have been issued.
So my company is suppose to shell out 40 million to another company to build a device that we have not build yet?
If your company hasn't built it yet, how do you even know it will work? Perhaps there are some fine details that are needed to be determined in order to write a valid patent application. Remember that a patent MUST be enabling in order for it to be valid.
1) Toss out the entire patent if any claims are disallowed. The applicant can start over from scratch and refile. If disallowed a second time, do not permit the applicant to file on the patent or any variation of it ever again. This would encourage the applicant to be very conservative in what he claims.
2) Remove the exclusitivity part of the notion of patents. Everyone who independently invents the same thing could get their own patent with the right to use, manufacture, or sell licenses to the invention.
3) Before any patent lawsuit may proceed, reevaluate the patent for patentability with the same rigor as the original evaluation and invite the alleged infringer to provide comments and evidence. A patent owner could target more than one alleged infringer at the same time by inviting all of them to provide comments and evidence for the reevaluation of the patent.
4) Award damages for willfull infringements only. If not limited to willfill infringements, give the infringer a statuatory period of time of at least one year to stop using the patent.
5) Permit the patent office to require a working copy of any invention they do not believe has actually been built. If the applicant cannot provide a working copy, charge a $100,000 fee for wasting the patent office's time with nonsense inventions.
6) If there is a question of whether or not the patent provides enough detail to build the patent, choose a person of ordinary skill in the art to build the invention from the patent application. The applicant would pay for all fees and costs involved.
7) Encourage parties to any lawsuit or court action (not just patents) to use mediation by requiring the plaintiff to pay the attorneys fees for both sides. Only if the defendant refuses the mediation would he pay his own attorneys fees.
My "wrong ending" that I was giving people yesterday:
Harry and Voldemort fight a duel at Hogwarts in front of the students and faculty. Voldemort hits Harry with a sex-change spell and Harry becomes Harriet. The fight ends with that. Voldemort and Harriet get married, go bowling every Friday night, and live happily ever after.
When I woke back up being wheeled out of surgery, I had a definite feeling of the passage of time. I couldn't tell how much time, but it certainly felt like it was a while.
I remember seeing a clock in the hallway as they rolled me along. To me, it felt like it was 9 pm rather than 9 am even though I had been wheeled in for surgery in the morning.
Slashdot Mirror
That is, essentially, my understanding, too.
A precedent is only binding on courts beneath the one that sets the precedent. The court that sets the precedent can decide it differently the next time around.
However, judges will often take serious consideration of findings of other courts even if there are no binding precedents. As such, that decision could cause problems for other defendants.
In the community where I live, the population density is approximately 1.4 people per square mile. The community covers about 50 square miles and has a population of aobut 70.
The population density trails off a bit no matter which direction you go. For example, driving west from the western edge of the community, it's about 5 miles until you get to the next house. And I don't know that anyone has lived in that house since the mid or late 1970s. There are a couple of houses about 2 miles north of the northern edge of the community. To the east, it's about 6 or 7 miles. Since there aren't any public roads going directly east, you have to take a round about trip that is more like 15 or 20 miles around to get to a point 6 miles east. To the south, the next house is about three miles from the southern edge of the community and maybe seven homes within 10 miles of the southern edge of the community.
And I think this is too crowded!
10 to 25 cents per track is about right.
Request arbitration.
If they turn it down, they pay for their own attorney's fees.
How about if each side pays their own, but if one side requests arbitration and the other refuses, the one who refuses pays for the attorneys fees for both sides?
Perhaps a little research before filing the lawsuit would be useful.
My suggestion for how to make the situation better is to require the plaintiff in any lawsuit to pay the attorney's fees of the defendant.
If the plaintiff wins, then they could recover the fees they paid if the defendant had sufficient assets. If the defendant doesn't have the assets, then why is the plaintiff even suing him?
If the plaintiff requests arbitration and the defendant refuses, then the defendant would pay his own attorney's fees. If the defendant requests arbitration the the plaintiff refuses, then the plaintiff would be barred from recovering any of the attorney's fees from the defendant.
It would force the plaintiff to really do their homework before filing suit and to make a determination ahead of time about whether or not the lawsuit was justified. It would end the RIAA's practice of going after anyone and everyone without any knowledge about whether or not the defendant was the culprit.
There was one other thing about that first CD player.
When my younger brother's wife saw it, she was so impressed that she asked me if I would leave it to her in my will.
I thought they were already here. I remember reading a multiplage newspaper story describing the technology while a grad student. That would place the time period as in the spring of 1980 or before.
In 1982, I had an idea that I described to a few people about using a CD to store aviation charts. The idea was to put a small display in an aircraft cockpit along with a small computer and using Loran radios to provide the current position to the computer so that it could display the location of the aircraft on the display for the pilot. Unfortunately, I didn't have any idea how to get the financial backing to try to produce the device. Now, of course, they have just that, but using GPS instead of Loran, and for far more than just aircraft. It would have never occurred to me to use them for cars.
In 1983, I wanted to store images of title records on CDs and had a customer of mine who was very interested in doing that. The customer was ready to foot the bill to send people to the local county courthouses where he did business to photograph the title records, page by page, for this purpose. But it never came around.
Later, in the early 1990's, my brother's company was publishing data on CDs and it cost quite a bit to write the data out every two weeks. He was going to buy a CD-writer so he could avoid sending them out to be done by an outside company. I think the cost to create the master at the time was $1,000. After that, pressing a few hundred CDs was not too bad. I advised him to wait a little while for the cost of the CD writer to decline in price from about $50,000 each. He bought his first CD writer for about $4,000 a year or so later.
Early on, I figured the audio CD players would never catch on unless they could bring them under $200 each. So I watched the newspapers and when one sold for $199.50 or so, I went to the store and bought one. At the time, everyone was fascinated by the idea that you could scratch them without affecting the sound. So every demo CD in the store had scratches across the bottom as people would test that out for themselves.
At that time, I lived near a large record shop. Their entire selection of CDs were on a table in the store that was about 3 ft by 3 ft and had plenty of empty space on top. Sure enough, they caught on and CDs really began to replace records in the store about a year or two later.
Why does the Department of Homeland Security vote on computer document standards?
Do they have some special expertise in the area or what?
If the rich individual or company refused arbitration, then they would take over their own attorney's fees. The arbitration, of course, would have to be in a timely matter.
Anyone dragging the suit out should have to pay the attorney's fees for both sides.
I'm of the opinion that in a lawsuit, the plaintiff and his lawyers should be required to pay the defendant's attorneys as well. Only if the plaintiff wants to take it to arbitration and the defendant refuses, should the defendant be required to pay his own attorney's fees.
If the plaintiff wins, the judge should be able to award him the legal fees, but only in a limited number of situations.
That would end a whole lot of abuses.
Just what government GUARANTEES fair and equal protection under the law?
What is the likelihood that he has signed any kind of confidentiality agreement with Circuit City?
If has signed no confidentiality agreement, are his actions criminal?
If it is a trade secret, wouldn't they really only be able to file a lawsuit (well, win a lawsuit) against someone who had never signed an agreement to keep it secret?
I know nothing about the particulars of thise case. If it is being leaked prior to being sent to the publications, then there is a good chance it is an employee who leaked it in violation of agreements they would undoubtedly be required to sign.
If it is being leaked by an employee of a publication, unless that employee had signed some confidentiality agreement with them, just what could they do about it? At best, it would seem like the only thing they could do is bring a lot of pressure on the publication to fire the employee.
If it was leaked once it was sent to a publication, they could narrow it down by providing each publication a version of the ad with a very slight difference and then look at the leaked versions to see which variation was used, and thus, from which publication it was leaked. I wonder if they tried this.
There is a time for troll or flamebait, but the terms are as likely to be used wrong by moderators who really don't understand the meaning of the terms or who were ignorant of the facts and assumed that the poster was trolling when they actually made an interesting and on-topic comment.
I agree that "wrong" would be quite useful.
That is precisely why I said: "you can sell it" instead of "you can sell copies of it".
The Ford Mustang analogy is not on-point. The First Sale Doctrine in copyright law specifically talks about recordings. I'm have no idea how much of a car is covered by copyright law at all. At least the design documents. Maybe even the basic design.
Thanks. I've been curious about the results since I saw several requests for systems for the contest.
That's not quite right.
Under the First Sale Doctrine, you are explicitly permitted to sell a copyrighted work you have purchased even if the copyright holder objects. There are some limitations for a "restored copyright". As I understand it, the "restored copyright" is when the copyright expired and then became available again when the copyright term was extended.
So if you have a legal copy of a current song, you can sell it to someone else.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. If you want legal advice, find a real lawyer.
I think the "First Sale Doctrine" would explicitly permit you to sell your copy.
I've been curious about the results of the Own The Box competition.
Did any boxes not get owned? How many?
How did the various OS's on the box fare?
Does anyone have any link to the results?
I think it depends on what kind of person you want to come back from prison after his term is over. The way we generally do it, it is a wonder that the recividism rate is not much, much higher because the prisoners aren't rehabilitated much at all.
If you want a prisoner to come out who is neither predator nor preyed upon and who is ready to rejoin society in a responsible manner, then their prison sentences need to be spent in a way that furthers that goal. That means that their prison life needs to be as close to normal as possible. That includes education and job training to enable them to live productively on the outside.
I really don't think anyone should be released from jail or prison until they at least have a GED.
Make prison life reasonably normal instead of a concrete jungle with life threatening dangers at every turn and you will save a lot of money as well because of the reduction in the costs of keeping a prisoner there and because of a lower recividsm rate afterwards.
People are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment.
At my first job out of college, we had a fire alarm drill one morning.
Just to liven it up a bit, the head of the department and I each grabbed a full load of 9-track backup tapes and carried them out.
We sure got a dirty look from the senior vice president.
Once proved to be workable, the applicant would get to keep it. The point is to see that it works, not to create a museum. In fact, the patent examiner could visit the applicants work site to see the device -- it wouldn't have to be done in the patent office itself.
As I understand it, applicants used to be required to submit a working model of the invention. I think that rule was removed because of the storage space required.
Patents MUST be enabling. If they are not enabling, they are not to be granted. It is up to the patent office to determine whether or not there is sufficient detail in the patent in order to build it.
In other words, you cannot patent anything and keep it secret at the same time. For the patent to be granted, you must have provided to anyone reading the patent all the information needed to build it. Once the patent expires, your competitors will have no trouble building the invention no matter how complex or unobvious it is because you already provided to them in the application everything they need to build the invention.
I didn't say "a person of ordinary skill". I said "a person of ordinary skill in the art". There is a big difference in the two and the phrase "a person of ordinary skill in the art" is, to the best of my understanding, a commonly used term in determining whether or not a patent is enabling. At least, in just about every serious discussion on the subject that I've read, heard, or been involved in, the phrase has been used.
"A person of ordinary skill in the art" is a person with training in whatever field the patent is in. For example, a patent on a radar circuit must contain enough detail that any competent electrical engineer had better be able to build it using his regular electrical engineering skills and the details provided in the patent. He does not need to have any special knowledge that a normal electrical engineer would not have. On the other hand, the patent would not usually provide sufficient detail for a normal high school spanish teacher to build the radar circuit.
If "a person of ordinary skill in the art" cannot build the invention from the description given in the patent, then the patent is certinly not enabling and therefore should never have been issued.
If your company hasn't built it yet, how do you even know it will work? Perhaps there are some fine details that are needed to be determined in order to write a valid patent application. Remember that a patent MUST be enabling in order for it to be valid.
My suggestions for patent reform:
1) Toss out the entire patent if any claims are disallowed. The applicant can start over from scratch and refile. If disallowed a second time, do not permit the applicant to file on the patent or any variation of it ever again. This would encourage the applicant to be very conservative in what he claims.
2) Remove the exclusitivity part of the notion of patents. Everyone who independently invents the same thing could get their own patent with the right to use, manufacture, or sell licenses to the invention.
3) Before any patent lawsuit may proceed, reevaluate the patent for patentability with the same rigor as the original evaluation and invite the alleged infringer to provide comments and evidence. A patent owner could target more than one alleged infringer at the same time by inviting all of them to provide comments and evidence for the reevaluation of the patent.
4) Award damages for willfull infringements only. If not limited to willfill infringements, give the infringer a statuatory period of time of at least one year to stop using the patent.
5) Permit the patent office to require a working copy of any invention they do not believe has actually been built. If the applicant cannot provide a working copy, charge a $100,000 fee for wasting the patent office's time with nonsense inventions.
6) If there is a question of whether or not the patent provides enough detail to build the patent, choose a person of ordinary skill in the art to build the invention from the patent application. The applicant would pay for all fees and costs involved.
7) Encourage parties to any lawsuit or court action (not just patents) to use mediation by requiring the plaintiff to pay the attorneys fees for both sides. Only if the defendant refuses the mediation would he pay his own attorneys fees.
My "wrong ending" that I was giving people yesterday:
Harry and Voldemort fight a duel at Hogwarts in front of the students and faculty.
Voldemort hits Harry with a sex-change spell and Harry becomes Harriet.
The fight ends with that.
Voldemort and Harriet get married, go bowling every Friday night, and live happily ever after.
So far, noone has believed me at all.
I underwent open heart surgery when I was 20.
When I woke back up being wheeled out of surgery, I had a definite feeling of the passage of time. I couldn't tell how much time, but it certainly felt like it was a while.
I remember seeing a clock in the hallway as they rolled me along. To me, it felt like it was 9 pm rather than 9 am even though I had been wheeled in for surgery in the morning.