By totally valid and legal, I'm talking about a situation where the patent holder sues you for infringement, and the courts find in their favour despite you having all the money in the world available for lawyers to fight the claim. Think of a case against someone like Microsoft or IBM.
Certainly, most cases where software patents are challenged, the case seems to go against the patent holder, but there are some that go in the patent holder's favour, and no doubt many more which aren't challenged as they know they have no hope of having it overturned.
While algorithms may not be patentable, it appears that inventing a machine that can implement such an algorithm can potentially be patentable, and such a machine could well be a standard off the shelf computer programmed with your favourite off the shelf programming language (or assembly).
I don't agree. Firstly, the patent should never have been granted in the first place, and secondly, even if it was a real invention with no prior art, it should have been granted.
There are plenty of software patents (maybe about 10% of those granted) that are totally valid and legal in accordance with US law. These can be every bit as damaging as the invalid patents.
Look at public key cryptography. A truly groundbreaking invention at the time, no prior art. Not obvious and so on. The patent has expired now, and it wasn't until it expired that e-commerce started to take off in a big way.
The harm caused by the patent - e-commerce growth and electronic communications stifled while the patent was still in force.
The benefit? Would the inventors have still come up with the idea if they weren't able to patent it? I'm pretty sure they would.
Would they still come up with the idea if the patent only lasted a couple of years? Almost certainly.
Well, NT 3.51 required a minimum of 20MB of RAM - very expensive at the time. NT without IE or any of the later service packs required 12MB of RAM. Still a lot, but it did make a difference.
We have electricity storage facilities in Wales/Scotland, and possibly some parts of England.
They consist of a large reservoir somewhere near the top of a hill and a hydroelectric turbine. During off peak times, electricity from other power stations is used to pump water up into the reservoir. In times of high demand, this water is used to generate electricity.
On a computer, everything is a copy. Viewing it requires you to copy it from the drive to RAM, then from RAM to the Video card.
If you put all your bank transactions on the drive, you are the copyright holder of that file, and so you could sue if someone copied (ie viewed) the information on the drive.
The password system on the drive exists to prevent people from making unauthorised copies of your work. - bank details, correspondence etc.
The copies may well be unauthorised because you want to keep the work private rather than any desire to make money out of them, but nevertheless copyright law covers this.
Therefore this is most definately covered by the DMCA / EUCD / whatever it might be in your country.
Another important point is that the development lifecylce in software is so much shorter than for mechanical devices.
If you go back to the late 1970s, mechanical devices haven't changed that much, other than for the fact a lot of them now have computer built into them.
Look at computers on the other hand, and you are back in an era where MS DOS, the GNU project, the personal computer, the GUI and pretty much everything we take for granted these days, didn't exist.
And more importantly, most of the more innovative projects for distributing information - Napster, Kazaa, EDonkey/EMule, Freenet, Gnutella and so on are.
At the last elections, we had to vote for our member of the european parliament, our local council, and for people in london, for the mayor.
The way we did this was to have two or three different ballot papers and two or three different ballot boxes. They count each one separately. The council / mayor votes on Thursday night onwards, and the European votes from Sunday onwards.
Slashdot Mirror
Well slate.msn.com has news about the great new features of Mozilla Firefox, and it is pretty favourable to Mozilla.
This one potential buyer is prepared to pay $50k. So it must be worth at least that.
The developers are not prepared to take $50k in exchange for it, so it must be worth more than $50k to them.
Dupes would be OK on a TV Network. The correct term there for them is repeats, and they happen all the time.
Europe is still a baby in terms of its current setup.
England is a very different matter of course.
Installing Binary Packages is what you do every time you run an Installshield Wizard. That doesn't seem to chase away too many people from Windows.
I may be wrong, but aren't some mail servers licenced like this - you pay for the number of mailboxes you want to have.
Not in Europe. Dasani was a total flop. Nobody bought it. I've never seen Aquafina, presumably pepsi aren't stupid enough to try it.
By totally valid and legal, I'm talking about a situation where the patent holder sues you for infringement, and the courts find in their favour despite you having all the money in the world available for lawyers to fight the claim. Think of a case against someone like Microsoft or IBM.
Certainly, most cases where software patents are challenged, the case seems to go against the patent holder, but there are some that go in the patent holder's favour, and no doubt many more which aren't challenged as they know they have no hope of having it overturned.
While algorithms may not be patentable, it appears that inventing a machine that can implement such an algorithm can potentially be patentable, and such a machine could well be a standard off the shelf computer programmed with your favourite off the shelf programming language (or assembly).
I don't agree. Firstly, the patent should never have been granted in the first place, and secondly, even if it was a real invention with no prior art, it should have been granted.
There are plenty of software patents (maybe about 10% of those granted) that are totally valid and legal in accordance with US law. These can be every bit as damaging as the invalid patents.
Look at public key cryptography. A truly groundbreaking invention at the time, no prior art. Not obvious and so on. The patent has expired now, and it wasn't until it expired that e-commerce started to take off in a big way.
The harm caused by the patent - e-commerce growth and electronic communications stifled while the patent was still in force.
The benefit? Would the inventors have still come up with the idea if they weren't able to patent it? I'm pretty sure they would.
Would they still come up with the idea if the patent only lasted a couple of years? Almost certainly.
Have you ever heard of anyone calling MS technical support about something in Office?
I haven't.
Sun/OOo has one big advantage of MS here. The fact that it is made in Germany.
All they need to do is set a time limit of say 999 years, and it will there will be no constitutional challenges.
Well, NT 3.51 required a minimum of 20MB of RAM - very expensive at the time. NT without IE or any of the later service packs required 12MB of RAM. Still a lot, but it did make a difference.
One reason for that is that there is VAT on ebooks but not on paper books.
We have electricity storage facilities in Wales/Scotland, and possibly some parts of England.
They consist of a large reservoir somewhere near the top of a hill and a hydroelectric turbine. During off peak times, electricity from other power stations is used to pump water up into the reservoir. In times of high demand, this water is used to generate electricity.
On a computer, everything is a copy. Viewing it requires you to copy it from the drive to RAM, then from RAM to the Video card.
If you put all your bank transactions on the drive, you are the copyright holder of that file, and so you could sue if someone copied (ie viewed) the information on the drive.
The password system on the drive exists to prevent people from making unauthorised copies of your work. - bank details, correspondence etc.
The copies may well be unauthorised because you want to keep the work private rather than any desire to make money out of them, but nevertheless copyright law covers this.
Therefore this is most definately covered by the DMCA / EUCD / whatever it might be in your country.
I converted one last weekend.
They are very happy with it, and have had no problems changing over so far.
Their only concern was that they might lose their bookmarks, but the install prog copied them across perfectly.
Another important point is that the development lifecylce in software is so much shorter than for mechanical devices.
If you go back to the late 1970s, mechanical devices haven't changed that much, other than for the fact a lot of them now have computer built into them.
Look at computers on the other hand, and you are back in an era where MS DOS, the GNU project, the personal computer, the GUI and pretty much everything we take for granted these days, didn't exist.
Konqueror is.
And more importantly, most of the more innovative projects for distributing information - Napster, Kazaa, EDonkey/EMule, Freenet, Gnutella and so on are.
You can get a pay as you talk mobile phone without any form of ID - just hand over some cash for the phone and a voucher and start talking.
Proving who you are isn't a problem because you don't need to even say who you are.
You go to your local county court, ask for a claim form, fill it in, hand it back to them with some money, they send it to the defendant.
This is how you do it in England. It is probably a bit different in the US, but the idea is the same.
My phone (HTC Himalaya) lets me play .wav files as ringtones. It isn't too difficult to convert an mp3 to a wav.
Well make sure there is so little money left that they can't afford the campaign contributions.
At the last elections, we had to vote for our member of the european parliament, our local council, and for people in london, for the mayor.
The way we did this was to have two or three different ballot papers and two or three different ballot boxes. They count each one separately. The council / mayor votes on Thursday night onwards, and the European votes from Sunday onwards.