US consumers view cell phones as portable phones. Japanese and Korean consumers view cell phones as integrated communication devices. Because of this, US consumers (by and large) have no desire to spend $500-$1000 per phone and would prefer the low end crappy phones that all carriers give out for free with a 1-2 year service agreement.
Because so few US consumers want the high-end phones, there is no purpose in mass producing the phones for the US market because the vendors wouldn't have enough customers to recoup their costs.
The markets for cell phones are completely different in the US and Japan. Currently, US consumers are far more price concious in cell phone purchases than the consumers in Japan or Korea.
To be consistent you should be willing to explicitly grant patents to ideas, both abstract and concrete, including the field of mathematics as well.
Well this isn't entirely true. The idea has to be useful and concrete. You can't patent abstracts in the sense of patenting the concept of integration; however, if the algorithm is fundamental to solving a problem, it's the property of the inventor.
DFTs are a perfect example. If someone dreamt up the idea of DFTs for signal processing, this revolutionary idea should be able to be patented, provided it's reduced to practice. It would be only one of the claims in a utility patent.
I'm just really getting sick of the view that all of an individual's work should be open to all without compensation. That's why they call it intellectual property... also I'm sick of people getting mad at corporations trying to get patents on ideas... they compensate the inventor.
What Mr. Salin is forgetting is that code is not literature or expression; it is a written implementation.
Because the code is an actual implementation of a new, unique, non-obvious idea, it qualifies for a utility patent. Anyone who has taken a design and implemented it understands that there are many ways to implement a particular idea, so it's not the actual implementation that's it's the underlying ideas... the implementation is simply a reduction to practice
Furthermore, people make arguments that underlying technologies such as XML and HTML should not be patentable. This is a ridiculous idea! XML and HTML were breakthroughs intellectually. The person or persons responsible for this breakthrough idea should be allowed to reap the rewards. If they decide they wish to open their ideas up to the world and let the world play with them, they can publish openly or file an SIR with the USPTO. The key is that it is the inventor's decision... not yours!
Re:The Lord Shines His Face Upon You.
on
Is 3G Irrelevant?
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· Score: 1
Actually, US/Japan/S.Korea have all started (and have mature) 3G CDMA2000 infrastructures. The migration path from CDMA to CDMA2000 is simple and very inexpensive. The migration path from GSM/GPRS->EDGE/GERAN->WCDMA is not.
The reason folks keep talking about holding onto 3G is that EDGE/GERAN allows faster throughputs (fast enough to qualify as "3G")... but it still DOESN'T address the issue of capacity... which GSM has a lot of trouble with (that's why so many companies are using 1/2 rate vocoders w/ GSM networks)
Bad planning by commitee left no future migration for GSM networks for capacity and now they're trying to squeeze as much as possible from last generations technology.
What's more interesting is when larger companies watch to see competitors try to enter the marketplace. They will earmark potential technological problems that the small company may run into and since they have:
a) experience in the field
b) plenty of extra (experienced) engineers to watch competitors and predict complications
c) lots of $$ ($75k-$100k for international patent applications)
They can effectively force companies less advanced in the field to find more complicated solutions or make the problem unsolvable.
The punchline is that these patents are used for "blocking" and the larger company will never sell rights and the competitor may be forced to exit the marketplace.
This seems much more against the spirit of patents then patenting an idea and oping it'll pay off some day.
Slashdot Mirror
Because so few US consumers want the high-end phones, there is no purpose in mass producing the phones for the US market because the vendors wouldn't have enough customers to recoup their costs.
The markets for cell phones are completely different in the US and Japan. Currently, US consumers are far more price concious in cell phone purchases than the consumers in Japan or Korea.
Well this isn't entirely true. The idea has to be useful and concrete. You can't patent abstracts in the sense of patenting the concept of integration; however, if the algorithm is fundamental to solving a problem, it's the property of the inventor. DFTs are a perfect example. If someone dreamt up the idea of DFTs for signal processing, this revolutionary idea should be able to be patented, provided it's reduced to practice. It would be only one of the claims in a utility patent. I'm just really getting sick of the view that all of an individual's work should be open to all without compensation. That's why they call it intellectual property... also I'm sick of people getting mad at corporations trying to get patents on ideas... they compensate the inventor.
As long as there's no prior art, go for it! :)
Because the code is an actual implementation of a new, unique, non-obvious idea, it qualifies for a utility patent. Anyone who has taken a design and implemented it understands that there are many ways to implement a particular idea, so it's not the actual implementation that's it's the underlying ideas... the implementation is simply a reduction to practice
Furthermore, people make arguments that underlying technologies such as XML and HTML should not be patentable. This is a ridiculous idea! XML and HTML were breakthroughs intellectually. The person or persons responsible for this breakthrough idea should be allowed to reap the rewards. If they decide they wish to open their ideas up to the world and let the world play with them, they can publish openly or file an SIR with the USPTO. The key is that it is the inventor's decision... not yours!
Actually, US/Japan/S.Korea have all started (and have mature) 3G CDMA2000 infrastructures. The migration path from CDMA to CDMA2000 is simple and very inexpensive. The migration path from GSM/GPRS->EDGE/GERAN->WCDMA is not.
The reason folks keep talking about holding onto 3G is that EDGE/GERAN allows faster throughputs (fast enough to qualify as "3G")... but it still DOESN'T address the issue of capacity... which GSM has a lot of trouble with (that's why so many companies are using 1/2 rate vocoders w/ GSM networks)
Bad planning by commitee left no future migration for GSM networks for capacity and now they're trying to squeeze as much as possible from last generations technology.
What's more interesting is when larger companies watch to see competitors try to enter the marketplace. They will earmark potential technological problems that the small company may run into and since they have: a) experience in the field b) plenty of extra (experienced) engineers to watch competitors and predict complications c) lots of $$ ($75k-$100k for international patent applications) They can effectively force companies less advanced in the field to find more complicated solutions or make the problem unsolvable. The punchline is that these patents are used for "blocking" and the larger company will never sell rights and the competitor may be forced to exit the marketplace. This seems much more against the spirit of patents then patenting an idea and oping it'll pay off some day.