Except that, unless the copyright's registered, you can only get an injunction and actual damages. You don't get the big money under statutory damages until you register. And if you register after the copying, you don't get statutory damages for the copying that happened prior to the registration.
27 seconds out of a 3:00 song isn't de minimus, 3 seconds might be. The de minimus exception usually applies to written works, where one lie from a 500 page work would be de minimus. And as for the commercial work, it can be commercial without charging money for the video. For instance, using a copyrighted work as advertising, where you charge for other goods/services is still a commercial use. Or using a copyrighted work on a website where you sell advertising, but don't charge for the content is a commercial use.
Certain circuits tend to favor certain sides. In CA, they like the entertainment industry, in NJ, they like Big Pharm and other Big industry. In MI they favor the auto makers. Even if you're having a jury trial every person on the jury knows someone who is in, or wants to be in, the dominant industry in the area.
She's probably going to lose if this goes to trial. The defense here against copyright infringment is fair use, and they will probably try to argue that it was in the category of a "significantly transformative" use. There's several factors to take into account when determining fair use, 1) the amount and nature of the portion taken, 2) the nature of the use, 3) the nature of the work and 4) the impairment of the copyright holder's ability to profit/control their work. see http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html for more info.
Without giving any actual legal advice on this case, I'd point out that the fact that she wasn't charging money for the video has NO effect. And the song itself wasn't changed or transformed, it was used to supplement a video work.
You can have a suit filed against you anytime, it doesn't matter if you filed first. You can have a first suit filed against you without doing anything, or have a second suit or a counterclaim filed if you file first. Prince didn't sue her because she's got no money. What would be the point? In fact, you generally want to file suit first, you get to pick the venue. Is 9th circuit (CA) or 2nd Circuit (NY) is friendlier to fair use?
You can file a suit without even having a takedown notice. If you have reason to believe that someone will sue you for infringement, you can initiate a suit for declaratory judgment, where you get to pick the venue and circumstances.
She went to the EFF because they'll handle her case for free. Yeah, she's doing it to make a point, but the EFF can get legal fees out of the copyright holders if they win, and she may get damages. The RIAA may pay her off just to avoid setting a precedent that they'd have to live with for the next 50 years.
You can have a million little moving parts in your camera!
The microelectrical mechanical device fabrication techniques used to make the DLP scanning mirrors are taken from tech used to etch transistors. Instead of a circuit bring etched, a movable mirror os etched into slicon or other substrates. And you end up with a bunch of little tiny mirrors moving around on a portable device. Moving parts tend to wear out more rapidly than solid state parts, and are more easily broken. I'd be interested to see how durable this tech is. DLP doesn't have this issue because no one carried a DLP projector or TV around.
There are PLENTY of intelligent, qualified, competent, and dedicated people available to companies that are willing to hire only on capabilities and ignore irrelivant-to-the-job superficialities and stereotypes.
And they're not the ones complaining about an IT shortage. The companies who want 10+ years of experience in.Net (I've actually seen this as a job requirement) and a BSCS who want to pay $40k a year are the ones complaining about an IT shortage.
That's exactly my complaint. I've seen jobs posted that are looking for 5 years of.Net experience in the finacial services field that pay $40k. BSCS required, MS preferred. Employers can't calim that there's an IT shortage when they want to pay $40k for a $100k job.
I went to law school for patent law a few years after getting my BS, and I constantly run into employers that are set on paying what they can afford instead of what comparable going rate is. When you're looking for a Patent Attorney with 5+ of technical experience in software and Electronics, with a BSEE, you shouldn't expect to pay the same as you would for a 25 year old law school grad who's never had a real (office-type) job who will be doing personal injury law.
No, but when you need out-of-major electives, the closest thing is CS, nad there was nothing of practical value besides basic programming classes. No Java, no SQL. Most of the CS classes were geared towards pure theory. That's great, but if you want to do something besides blue sky research, you're going to need practical skills.
Having said that, I did pay for most of my schooling by working for 6 years as a programmer on the back of 5 programming classes. And I began a startup with a guy that kept trying to bring in CS grad students, none of whom were worth a crap. And when I've been in a position to hire programmers and software engineers, none of the best ones I saw had CS degrees.
There's not a shortage of IT workers in the U.S., there's a shortage of IT workers who will work for $25K a year in the U.S. Want a native English speaker with.Net programming skills, it'll cost more than that.
Besides most universities don't teach practical IT skills. Rarely did I ever see a class in Visual C++ or in.Net. Want to learn compiler design theory or advanced data structures? no problem. Want to learn how to set up a WIndows server? that's where ITT Tech comes in. And tech schools in the U.S. have a stigma attached to them where most who are qualified to go to a 4 year university would attend a tech school. I got my EE degree, but learned command-line Pascal in an elective. I had to learn Delphi,.Net, C++ and PHP on my own. The people who are motivated to learn on their own have some drive and expect to be promoted at some point, not to get 4% raises every two years for the rest of their lives.
Gates needs to be a good little capitalist and pay the market rate.
Do you think the greatest threat of an e-voting system being hijacked is during the voting itself, with one or more people influencing things at the polling place, during the processing, with untrained, nonaccountable poll workers and supervisors, or do you think a greater threat would be someone maliciously attacking an electronic vote counting reposiotory/database?
Seems like there was some talk a couple of years ago about doing the AC-DC conversion on a massive level, then running individual servers off a server-room wide source. If you create +-12v output on a block of plugs, and +-5v outputs on another set of plugs, you could achieve much better efficiencies. You'd also probably cut your costs significantly. If you put a massive AC-DC transfomer in another area, you could isolate the cooling systems, etc. One large cooling system for a single, large power supply woiuld be more efficient thatn 50,000 individual power supply cooling systems. You might also be able to isolate any out-of phase conditions all those servers would create.
You could also use off the shelf motherboards, and just run longer cables to the wall. THere's likely not enough power running through the wires to account for a significantdrop over a relatively short distance.
However, some of the issue would be a single point of faiturel in the power supply, and one bad motherboard could take down an entire set of plugs nore easily than with AC.
The broadest claims are independent, not citing another claim, or being built upon another claim.
Dependent claims are narrower, and cite an independent claim, or another depoendent claim, and add at least 1 limitation to the cited claim.
To have a non-obvious, novel claim, you simply have to have 1 limitation in a claim that is not found in the prior art.
This is why applicants add additional dependent claims, in cas ethey can't get their original independent claim allowed. (You get up to 3 independent claims, and 20 claims total in a patent application before you start having to add extra fees for more claims.)
When invalidating claims you want to go for the narrowest claim if you can, because if a claim with lots of limiations is invalid, anything with fewer limiations is invalid as well. For instance, while an electric light is known prior art, an electric light that makes a ham sandwich is not known to the prior art. There, the patent for the electric light/ham sandwich maker would only cover electric lights that also make ham sandwiches. It would not cover electric lights that did not make ham sandwiches, or ham sandwich makers that were not also electric lights.
Conversely, for infringement, simply adding a restriction to your infringing product will not get you out of infringment. Referring to the previous example, if someone were to patent an electric light that made ham sandwiches, that patent covers all ham sandwich making electric lights, even if they only work underwater, etc.
But by going after the broadest claim, the scope of the patent can be narrowed, to where the patent doesn't cover a significantly restrictive aspect of the technology.
Corporations are not gtranted patents in the U.S., people are. The corporations get an assignment from their emplyees, which essentially means that the company owns the patent, but the Applicants are always one or more individuals. However, no one goes to jail over this, the patent just gets invalidated.
What Dan Ravicher was referring to is the duty to disclose any known prior art found prior to, or during patent prosecution. Courts have frequently punished patent holders for knowing failing to disclose prior art by invalidating the entire patent. This usually only happens in court when someone gets sued for patent infringement, or when a party takes the issue to court to get a declaratory judgment finding the patent invalid. Surely no one out there wants to spend the money it'd take to get this invalidated in court.
When the issue gets brought up before the PTO, they generally just invalidate the broadest claims, and narrow the scope of the patent until it's worthless.
Patent applications are generally not published for 18 months. However, if you'd like to view them once they've been published, there's the USPTO website.
Problem is, that most people don't know the intricacies of what makes a patent valid, and how to cite prior art. Just saying that a piece of already written software did the same thing isn't good enough. You need publication within a certain time frame, and the prior art needs to be very, very close, even when combined with other prior art references. One small claim limiation different from the prior art is all it takes to gat a patent allowed.
Social networks may be a good idea, but it can take hours and hours to review a patent application. There's a reason patent attorneys get paid well.
The USPTO has proposed an opposition period like that in Europe, and like the U.S. has for trademarks. But the only people that are going to bother opposing are the competitors of the company seeking a patent.
There are far more geeky things to do. Wny bother talikning to someone on the other side of the world via ham when I can just use my cellphone? Is it the random encounters with people you don't know?
It's more fun to frag someone in Quake then drop some smack in context.
My uncle had all his ham licenses when I was a kid. I was 9 and didn't see why it was fun then either. Looking back, it kind of seems like lame social networking for geeks.
I totally agree with you about advertising profits outweighing the loss in buyers, but with that loss in buyers comes a lower advertising rate. Surely Coca-cola would pay less for a game that reaches only 850,000 people than for a game that reaches 1,000,000.
However, if you buy into the free market philosophy, the amount of advertising and the amount charged for advertising will reach a natural equilibrium.
I'd also point out that there's a lot of advertising going into games that people don't even realize. FOr thoseracing games you mentioned, do you think Toyota would kick in a little something extra to always have their new sports car be the default vehicle seletion for racers? And they'd probably kick in to juice the car's stats a little bit, espectially if it gets bumped to where it's the best car in the game.
It's a pure numbers play. If a game company estaimates that 15% of gamers will not buy a game because of ads, will the ad revenue make up for the 15% loss in sales?
In other words, will putting ads in a game make more money? I assume it does, becasue we see more and more ads in games.
Arguably, even the 15% or gamers who wouldn't play a game with ads wouldn't find out that there were ads in the game, or that the ads bothered them until after they bought the game. You think Best Buy's going to give a refund because someone doesn't like the graphics?
Besides, if a gamer wants a game as realistic as possbile, there should be MORE advertising in games, just like in the real world.
I agree with you completely here. The telcos built up huge war chests when they were the only game in town, and now they're using their considerable power to beat down the competition. Look at all the legilation banning Municipal Wi-Fi.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that, unless the copyright's registered, you can only get an injunction and actual damages. You don't get the big money under statutory damages until you register. And if you register after the copying, you don't get statutory damages for the copying that happened prior to the registration.
he gets to keep his job in return for signing the new contract.
27 seconds out of a 3:00 song isn't de minimus, 3 seconds might be. The de minimus exception usually applies to written works, where one lie from a 500 page work would be de minimus. And as for the commercial work, it can be commercial without charging money for the video. For instance, using a copyrighted work as advertising, where you charge for other goods/services is still a commercial use. Or using a copyrighted work on a website where you sell advertising, but don't charge for the content is a commercial use.
Certain circuits tend to favor certain sides. In CA, they like the entertainment industry, in NJ, they like Big Pharm and other Big industry. In MI they favor the auto makers. Even if you're having a jury trial every person on the jury knows someone who is in, or wants to be in, the dominant industry in the area.
She's probably going to lose if this goes to trial. The defense here against copyright infringment is fair use, and they will probably try to argue that it was in the category of a "significantly transformative" use. There's several factors to take into account when determining fair use, 1) the amount and nature of the portion taken, 2) the nature of the use, 3) the nature of the work and 4) the impairment of the copyright holder's ability to profit/control their work. see http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html for more info.
Without giving any actual legal advice on this case, I'd point out that the fact that she wasn't charging money for the video has NO effect. And the song itself wasn't changed or transformed, it was used to supplement a video work.
You can have a suit filed against you anytime, it doesn't matter if you filed first. You can have a first suit filed against you without doing anything, or have a second suit or a counterclaim filed if you file first. Prince didn't sue her because she's got no money. What would be the point? In fact, you generally want to file suit first, you get to pick the venue. Is 9th circuit (CA) or 2nd Circuit (NY) is friendlier to fair use?
You can file a suit without even having a takedown notice. If you have reason to believe that someone will sue you for infringement, you can initiate a suit for declaratory judgment, where you get to pick the venue and circumstances.
She went to the EFF because they'll handle her case for free. Yeah, she's doing it to make a point, but the EFF can get legal fees out of the copyright holders if they win, and she may get damages. The RIAA may pay her off just to avoid setting a precedent that they'd have to live with for the next 50 years.
And yes, I am an IP/patent attorney.
You can have a million little moving parts in your camera!
The microelectrical mechanical device fabrication techniques used to make the DLP scanning mirrors are taken from tech used to etch transistors. Instead of a circuit bring etched, a movable mirror os etched into slicon or other substrates. And you end up with a bunch of little tiny mirrors moving around on a portable device. Moving parts tend to wear out more rapidly than solid state parts, and are more easily broken. I'd be interested to see how durable this tech is. DLP doesn't have this issue because no one carried a DLP projector or TV around.
There are PLENTY of intelligent, qualified, competent, and dedicated people available to companies that are willing to hire only on capabilities and ignore irrelivant-to-the-job superficialities and stereotypes. And they're not the ones complaining about an IT shortage. The companies who want 10+ years of experience in .Net (I've actually seen this as a job requirement) and a BSCS who want to pay $40k a year are the ones complaining about an IT shortage.
That's exactly my complaint. I've seen jobs posted that are looking for 5 years of .Net experience in the finacial services field that pay $40k. BSCS required, MS preferred. Employers can't calim that there's an IT shortage when they want to pay $40k for a $100k job.
I went to law school for patent law a few years after getting my BS, and I constantly run into employers that are set on paying what they can afford instead of what comparable going rate is. When you're looking for a Patent Attorney with 5+ of technical experience in software and Electronics, with a BSEE, you shouldn't expect to pay the same as you would for a 25 year old law school grad who's never had a real (office-type) job who will be doing personal injury law.
No, but when you need out-of-major electives, the closest thing is CS, nad there was nothing of practical value besides basic programming classes. No Java, no SQL. Most of the CS classes were geared towards pure theory. That's great, but if you want to do something besides blue sky research, you're going to need practical skills.
Having said that, I did pay for most of my schooling by working for 6 years as a programmer on the back of 5 programming classes. And I began a startup with a guy that kept trying to bring in CS grad students, none of whom were worth a crap. And when I've been in a position to hire programmers and software engineers, none of the best ones I saw had CS degrees.
There's not a shortage of IT workers in the U.S., there's a shortage of IT workers who will work for $25K a year in the U.S. Want a native English speaker with .Net programming skills, it'll cost more than that.
.Net. Want to learn compiler design theory or advanced data structures? no problem. Want to learn how to set up a WIndows server? that's where ITT Tech comes in. And tech schools in the U.S. have a stigma attached to them where most who are qualified to go to a 4 year university would attend a tech school. I got my EE degree, but learned command-line Pascal in an elective. I had to learn Delphi, .Net, C++ and PHP on my own. The people who are motivated to learn on their own have some drive and expect to be promoted at some point, not to get 4% raises every two years for the rest of their lives.
Besides most universities don't teach practical IT skills. Rarely did I ever see a class in Visual C++ or in
Gates needs to be a good little capitalist and pay the market rate.
Do you think the greatest threat of an e-voting system being hijacked is during the voting itself, with one or more people influencing things at the polling place, during the processing, with untrained, nonaccountable poll workers and supervisors, or do you think a greater threat would be someone maliciously attacking an electronic vote counting reposiotory/database?
Seems like there was some talk a couple of years ago about doing the AC-DC conversion on a massive level, then running individual servers off a server-room wide source. If you create +-12v output on a block of plugs, and +-5v outputs on another set of plugs, you could achieve much better efficiencies. You'd also probably cut your costs significantly. If you put a massive AC-DC transfomer in another area, you could isolate the cooling systems, etc. One large cooling system for a single, large power supply woiuld be more efficient thatn 50,000 individual power supply cooling systems. You might also be able to isolate any out-of phase conditions all those servers would create.
You could also use off the shelf motherboards, and just run longer cables to the wall. THere's likely not enough power running through the wires to account for a significantdrop over a relatively short distance.
However, some of the issue would be a single point of faiturel in the power supply, and one bad motherboard could take down an entire set of plugs nore easily than with AC.
If all that happened was a disconnected hard drive cable, you were lucky, or the rubberized case worked very, very well.
The click of death probably comes from a moving part, and in full-size and mini-iPods (non-nano or shuffle), the only moving part is the hard drive.
Imagine what would have happened if the hard drive of your iPod was actually spinning at a couple thousand RPM when you chucked it off the balcony.
I have to think that bad drives, cracked screens or bad batteries are the biggest hardware problems ipod users face.
In short, yes.
The broadest claims have the fewest limitations.
The broadest claims are independent, not citing another claim, or being built upon another claim.
Dependent claims are narrower, and cite an independent claim, or another depoendent claim, and add at least 1 limitation to the cited claim.
To have a non-obvious, novel claim, you simply have to have 1 limitation in a claim that is not found in the prior art.
This is why applicants add additional dependent claims, in cas ethey can't get their original independent claim allowed. (You get up to 3 independent claims, and 20 claims total in a patent application before you start having to add extra fees for more claims.)
When invalidating claims you want to go for the narrowest claim if you can, because if a claim with lots of limiations is invalid, anything with fewer limiations is invalid as well. For instance, while an electric light is known prior art, an electric light that makes a ham sandwich is not known to the prior art. There, the patent for the electric light/ham sandwich maker would only cover electric lights that also make ham sandwiches. It would not cover electric lights that did not make ham sandwiches, or ham sandwich makers that were not also electric lights.
Conversely, for infringement, simply adding a restriction to your infringing product will not get you out of infringment. Referring to the previous example, if someone were to patent an electric light that made ham sandwiches, that patent covers all ham sandwich making electric lights, even if they only work underwater, etc.
But by going after the broadest claim, the scope of the patent can be narrowed, to where the patent doesn't cover a significantly restrictive aspect of the technology.
Corporations are not gtranted patents in the U.S., people are. The corporations get an assignment from their emplyees, which essentially means that the company owns the patent, but the Applicants are always one or more individuals. However, no one goes to jail over this, the patent just gets invalidated.
What Dan Ravicher was referring to is the duty to disclose any known prior art found prior to, or during patent prosecution. Courts have frequently punished patent holders for knowing failing to disclose prior art by invalidating the entire patent. This usually only happens in court when someone gets sued for patent infringement, or when a party takes the issue to court to get a declaratory judgment finding the patent invalid. Surely no one out there wants to spend the money it'd take to get this invalidated in court.
When the issue gets brought up before the PTO, they generally just invalidate the broadest claims, and narrow the scope of the patent until it's worthless.
Patent applications are generally not published for 18 months. However, if you'd like to view them once they've been published, there's the USPTO website.
Problem is, that most people don't know the intricacies of what makes a patent valid, and how to cite prior art. Just saying that a piece of already written software did the same thing isn't good enough. You need publication within a certain time frame, and the prior art needs to be very, very close, even when combined with other prior art references. One small claim limiation different from the prior art is all it takes to gat a patent allowed.
Social networks may be a good idea, but it can take hours and hours to review a patent application. There's a reason patent attorneys get paid well.
The USPTO has proposed an opposition period like that in Europe, and like the U.S. has for trademarks. But the only people that are going to bother opposing are the competitors of the company seeking a patent.
There are far more geeky things to do. Wny bother talikning to someone on the other side of the world via ham when I can just use my cellphone? Is it the random encounters with people you don't know?
It's more fun to frag someone in Quake then drop some smack in context.
My uncle had all his ham licenses when I was a kid. I was 9 and didn't see why it was fun then either. Looking back, it kind of seems like lame social networking for geeks.
I totally agree with you about advertising profits outweighing the loss in buyers, but with that loss in buyers comes a lower advertising rate. Surely Coca-cola would pay less for a game that reaches only 850,000 people than for a game that reaches 1,000,000.
However, if you buy into the free market philosophy, the amount of advertising and the amount charged for advertising will reach a natural equilibrium.
I'd also point out that there's a lot of advertising going into games that people don't even realize. FOr thoseracing games you mentioned, do you think Toyota would kick in a little something extra to always have their new sports car be the default vehicle seletion for racers? And they'd probably kick in to juice the car's stats a little bit, espectially if it gets bumped to where it's the best car in the game.
It's a pure numbers play. If a game company estaimates that 15% of gamers will not buy a game because of ads, will the ad revenue make up for the 15% loss in sales?
In other words, will putting ads in a game make more money? I assume it does, becasue we see more and more ads in games.
Arguably, even the 15% or gamers who wouldn't play a game with ads wouldn't find out that there were ads in the game, or that the ads bothered them until after they bought the game. You think Best Buy's going to give a refund because someone doesn't like the graphics?
Besides, if a gamer wants a game as realistic as possbile, there should be MORE advertising in games, just like in the real world.
Drop a cookie on their computer when they visit your site through an ad click, and read the cookie when they visit later.
Just send me $5,000 so I can write it for you. Maybe I'll knock the price down to $4,000 for public patents.
But it won't cost you a cent to file it. You'll save $500!.
Sincerely,
Sharkb8
registered patent agent.
no, really.
This is an excellent point.
Maybe MS doesn't want to provide proof that their OS is so easily corruptible.
Bet those were Windows machines that couldn't recover from the malware. Good thing thing MS spotted that problem. Now if only someone could fix it....
I agree with you completely here. The telcos built up huge war chests when they were the only game in town, and now they're using their considerable power to beat down the competition. Look at all the legilation banning Municipal Wi-Fi.