If it's part of your _job function_ to be on-call, or otherwise, then the company absolutely has to pay for the service, simply for the risk-management aspect of making sure that the service is indeed always there. One other poster mentioned your "free internet" you get out of this: well, this is pretty simple -- if the company doesn't want to let you use it for free internet, nothing stops you from paying for your own recreational use connection.
If it's not part of your _job function_ to be on-call (since, I too have been in R&D '4th line' support at times), then the company can't really demand anything of you. If you truely don't use the internet, you can claim that you don't have the budget for it - company can't force you to do pay for it out of your own money. If you do have your internet connection, then I don't actually see a problem for the occasional times you may need to use it for company purposes (after all, how many of us occasionally surf at work for personal and other reasons).
The point is that once GIF was obviously encumbered, people developed and moved to new (and, in fact, better) technologies. You could argue that if it wasn't for GIF patent protection, we might have been lazier about moving forward with PNG, JPG or otherwise. I don't see that there is any "hell" going on here. I bet the majority of readers here have something to do with images on a day to day basis: tell me just what proportion of this involves GIF - in other words, apart from the nice ability to slag off patents again, just who in practice is inhibited by this?
"the average consumer does not have the time or money to rush out and buy the new model every 6 months"
It's not just about the "continual upgrade cycle", which I have seen people get trapped into (always needing the latest model...); but it's also about the new adopters who want to buy a product, and they are either going to buy state of the art from Company X, or Company Y - meaning that unless both X and Y continue to keep pace and outdo each other, they'll fall behind in the market.
I think the pace in this market is also about the component supply side: IC and other manufacturers are also on rapid release cycles, and they're driving the input chains to the equipment manufacturers. The components are not always radical either, e.g. 2mpixel to 3mpixel IC upgrade, which means that incremental revision of products is actually quite easy, it's not like a 12 month development cycle for completely new product, it's largely regression. And if you as Company X offer 3mp at the same pricepoint as Company Y 2mp, then consumers are not going to care too much and they'll move to X.
Don't forget that many consumers don't upgrade every 6 months, they might upgrade every 2 or 3 years - and each time they do, then you as a the manufacturer want to capture them when they are in that window.
My comment was directed to the "mislabelled" price, not the subsequent charging of his card (which, I agree, has some issues). A vendor can refuse to sell goods that are obviously mislabelled. Of course, vendor can also try some dirty tricks in this regard, but largely they don't get away with it. I have amazon, dell and other examples to back this up.
"I don't know what the laws are in the rest of the country but what you speak about is illegal here in New York. The store has to honor the price on the item and if the store refuses you can call the police."
It's certainly not like that in the UK, nor was it like that for Dell's online mishap, nor the same for Amazon.
I think you need to distinguish between regular advertised prices, and prices that are incorrectly labelled. If the store lists a $500 item for $50 less, then they are unlikely to succeed, but if they list a $4000 for $400, then they probably will.
Actually, BestBuy is in the right here. There have been other legal cases, and it's been established that your "purchase" is really an offer to the vendor to buy, and thus if the item is wrongly priced, they can refuse the offer -- some issues depend upon the exact working of the vendors terms and conditions of sale.
This is exactly what happens in a bricks and morter store: the goods on display are not on offer, the offer is when you take the good to the counter.
This is because the article fails to distinguish the difference between the number of bugs and the impact of those bugs.
The number seems (avoiding the arguments raised by other posters) actually relatively constant across all OSs.
The impact though, is significantly worse: because Windows bugs are actively exploited through Virus/Worms/etc and then have wide spread impact because of the sheer market size of the Windows, and the nature of the use of Windows.
To do a fair comparison of "impact analysis", you need to both look at the raw data (presented here), but then assess it in terms of number of expoits of those bugs, and then total overall impact. I think it will be clear that having done this, Windows will stick out by a mile.
However, the data does illustrate that the other OSs are not _intrinsically_ more secure than Windows, it's just that they don't receive as much attention. This means that if virus/worm writers focused on these other OSs or hackers actually targetted penetration of them, then the results would be no different that the problems seen with Windows today.
From another perspective, if you were thinking that your organisation may be the _active target_ of hackers, then choosing other OSs over Windows may not actually make much difference to your threat risk - you're just as vulnerable. However, if you're not the type of organisation that may be an _active target_, -- e.g. you're just a boring car rental paper-pushing company with Linux desktops -- then you'd actually be better off with the other OSs because of the far higher impact of bugs seen with Windows.
Of course, but lawyers understand them just as well as developers understand multiple-inheritance, polymorphism and dynamic dispatch.
"Say my next door neighbor works in an autoshop, and is under contract not to compete with his employer... so if I ask him to help me fix something on my car, is he commiting a crime?"
Possibly, but it depends on a number of factors. Did he just fix your car? Or does it fix other peoples cars as well? Does he use tools from the workplace? etc.
"What if he does just as a favor for me (no money changes hands), would that be more/less/the same of a crime?"
No different. A crime is a crime irrespective of whether you were paid to do it or not. Technically we're not talking about crime here, we're talking about breach of contract.
"If he stopped on the freeway and helped an old lady change a tire, is he now a criminal?"
I doubt it.
"Now of course "intellectual property" and the service of changing a tire are very different things, but when you look at computer code as the result of work done by a programmer, and a changed tire as the result of work done by an automechanic, what makes one persons work "intellectual property", and the other persons not?"
Huh? Underneath these issues are common issues law, liability and contract. Changing a tire has nothing to do with intellectual property, but it's still a breach of contract of service. The general rule is that an employer cannot restrain you from undertaking independent work, so long as that independent work is non-competitive and does not utilise time, effort and resources of the employer.
If the mechanic used workplace tools to change your tire, he could be in trouble. If he used his own tools, he's probably okay. If he's charging you money or getting something in return, it's probably okay so long as he's not making a regular business out of it.
Anyway, why I am explaining to you? Go read a book on law 101.
Of course it's different, but it's a legitimate issue to raise now that we're talking about F/OSS and indemnification.
"And IANAL, but I really don't think an employer who had an employee contracted not to produce work for anyone other than the employer would be able to sue anyone besides the employee who broke contract."
It's clear that your not a lawyer, because the circumstances are blindingly obvious: employee "moonlights", then employer claims that employee contributed unauthorised works to a F/OSS project, so employer as owner of the works (because, employee's contract says so) can take action directly against projects in which works are embodied.
"This is one of the most ridiculus things about the SCO vs. AutoZone etc. cases: even assuming SCO has the rights to any source code used in Linux, why is AutoZone liable for that?"
Because AutoZone has the works in its possession and is in fact using the works: it doesn't matter about any intermediate chains. If you have a pirate DVD in your possession, it doesn't matter who pirated it for you, the copyright owner can take action against you (and of course, they can also take action against the pirate if they can get their hands on him/her).
"The inventor sued them, and won rightfully. I don't think he would have won if he had tried to sue someone who had bought or used a car that had windshield wipers."
He would have won just as easily: infringement occurs if you possess, not just manufacturer. But the point is, why try and take action against 100000 separate car owners, when you can take against against 1 large car manufacturer. This is about the practical economics of litigation. I'm surprised you don't understand it.
How many of you are reading this now, as paid daytime employees who write F/OSS software in the evenings, not aware of the Intellectual Property clauses in your employment contract, nor of the legal cases over direct or indirect (subconscious) copying of software - meaning that your day work could spill over into your evening work, meaning that you employer may actually have grounds to take you on in a law suit some day?
I'm not sure if there is a could hanging over F/OSS, but there certainly seem to risks that people are not aware of.
"The idea of restricting CPU's, or ANY form of computer software for that matter, is completly without justification."
Completely untrue. For a long time, the Wassenar agreements have prohibited exports of "dual use" technology, and this includes advanced technology. Naturally, as time goes on, the state of the art changes, so what was advanced technology yesterday, is not today. Continual review is needed.
But, it is without doubt the restricting supplies of advanced technologies does make things harder. Try design and simulation of advanced materials without the use of computing tools. Sure, you can do it, but at a snails pace. I mean, the simple example is that I'll set up a research lab with pentium based computing hardware and software, and you'll set up a lab using i386 based. Tell me who is going to be more productive ?
I see no problem with restricting supplies to "rogue states", but I do see lots of problems with identifying what are the rogue states, viz. the WMD fiasco with iraq.
"Unlike copyright, patent law is a purely economical law, so unless you have proof that more patents = better economy under all circumstances, denying patents in case of doubt does not necessarily go against the concept of the patent system."
Yes it does: you clearly didn't read my post nor think through the issue. If the benefit of the doubt doesn't go towards the inventor, then the patent office is going to throw away patents that it can't properly decide upon, but are actually valid. This would prevent things from being patentable.
As I stated, the real problem is the lack of opposition process: meaning that a "questionable" patent would be given the benefit of the doubt by the examiner, and then enter pre-publication and opposition phase, where it is open to the entire public, and this entire public which includes those at the top of their field, can then challenge the patent before it is granted (or, in a short period after grant).
The problem with the USPTO is that there is no decent opposition system. Introduce a more effective and workable opposition system, and watch the public (whether eff, patpub or other companies) take it up and use it to put a stop to bad patents. In doing so, this will start to make the patent office look bad (i.e. high rates of opposition), and provide some real/effective backpressure into the office to do something about the quality of its examinations. At the moment, there is no good "feedback" into the USPTO other than all of our ranting and raving and the "occasional" re-examination.
"There is definetly a large need to stop the excessive Patents."
In fact, I have been wondering recently whether anti-trust can be used here. In the EU, at least, the competition authorities are pretty good at pursuing activities that are detrimental to competition, and I'm waiting for someone to make the argument that this blue-chip process of mass-patent-filing and mass-cross-licensing is tantamount to a cartel ("the tragedy of the anti-commons") that excludeds others from effectively using patents.
It seems to me that a lot of these "dodgy" patents are the result of companies with too much budget aimed at patenting anything the engineers and the patent attorneys can think off. I used to read IEEE publications and think a lot of engineers with numerous awarded patents, but now being a bit older and wiser, I realise that if you work in a big blue-chip, the patent attorney's will help you pursue patents on anything and everything, even the most trivial patent that never returns its value.
But what the sum of all these patents do is give the blue-chip a huge arsenal it can use in the cross-licensing stakes with other blue-chips: and if they don't continue to build piles of patents, they'll miss out on the cross-licensing opportunities and be really shafted as legal teams from other blue-chips aim infringement canons for patents that may be trivial, but can chew up $millions in litigation time and expenses.
"But the majority of patents filed are not coming from independent inventors. They're coming from businesses either to try and take claim of some recent "innovation" (double-clicking or pushing a button) or as defensive patents."
We're talking about two separate problems here though. The problem of "giving the inventor the benefit of the doubt" is separate to the problem of "not effectively considering the patent against the state of the art".
We should never change the former, because it goes against the concept of the patent system, yet we should urgently fix the latter, because the lack of proper time/effort in assessing the patent is what is causing examiners to lean towards the former.
Getting rid of the former would be like changing the system from presumption of innocence to presumption of guilt. The problem with the latter is analogous to cops running around and stuffing people into shackles and prison cells without due cause ("shoot first, ask questions later"). The patent system is just as broken on the latter as is the law enforcement system wrt. ineffective anti-terrorism laws.
"2. The US government is pro-business (as it should be, IMHO). However, this translates into the default standing order at the USPTO being "accept", and not "reject" (whereas most/.'ers want to see "reject" as the default position)."
FYI
Giving the benefit of the doubt to the inventor is not "pro-business", it's because (and the same principle is followed in the EPO, and probably elsewhere) when the examiner can't tell one way or another, it should lean towards granting the patent: and if the patent is dodgy, then it will be resolved later.
The real problem is just that: in the EPO and elsewhere, there is a decent opposition system, where anyone can file and participate in opposing the patent. In the USPTO, the "re-examination" procedure is very limited and very poor.
I mean, just think of the scientist that comes up with an amazingly new novel way of doing something, but the examiner (who, you have to admit, could never be as on top of the field as a star scientist) isn't "quite" sure: denying the patent would be outrageous. By definition, inventions are novel and non-obvious: and that means "they go where no man has gone before", thus it's not surprising that figuring them out can sometimes be a problem.
Great onefor the lawyers: they earn a lump in prosecuting the patents, then leave the s**t hanging around for the chump techies to do free patent busting work.
If this is going to happen, it should be based on an _actively_ votable (i.e. "polling booth") list of patents (or, at least, patent areas) corresponding to important open source projects, e.g. "patents relating to scheduling improvements in operating systems". I think these are more important than "1-cluck shapping".
Re:You changed formats and didn't bother to test i
on
eFax Hell?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"So I'm going to go against your decision that this was the customer's fault for not closely monitoring a format change"
It's a case of "caveat emptor", or "let the buyer beware": on the one hand, you could blame eFax for the fault, but at the same time, as anyone who deals with business software knows, you always test first.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty simple to me.
If it's part of your _job function_ to be on-call, or otherwise, then the company absolutely has to pay for the service, simply for the risk-management aspect of making sure that the service is indeed always there. One other poster mentioned your "free internet" you get out of this: well, this is pretty simple -- if the company doesn't want to let you use it for free internet, nothing stops you from paying for your own recreational use connection.
If it's not part of your _job function_ to be on-call (since, I too have been in R&D '4th line' support at times), then the company can't really demand anything of you. If you truely don't use the internet, you can claim that you don't have the budget for it - company can't force you to do pay for it out of your own money. If you do have your internet connection, then I don't actually see a problem for the occasional times you may need to use it for company purposes (after all, how many of us occasionally surf at work for personal and other reasons).
The point is that once GIF was obviously encumbered, people developed and moved to new (and, in fact, better) technologies. You could argue that if it wasn't for GIF patent protection, we might have been lazier about moving forward with PNG, JPG or otherwise. I don't see that there is any "hell" going on here. I bet the majority of readers here have something to do with images on a day to day basis: tell me just what proportion of this involves GIF - in other words, apart from the nice ability to slag off patents again, just who in practice is inhibited by this?
"the average consumer does not have the time or money to rush out and buy the new model every 6 months"
...); but it's also about the new adopters who want to buy a product, and they are either going to buy state of the art from Company X, or Company Y - meaning that unless both X and Y continue to keep pace and outdo each other, they'll fall behind in the market.
It's not just about the "continual upgrade cycle", which I have seen people get trapped into (always needing the latest model
I think the pace in this market is also about the component supply side: IC and other manufacturers are also on rapid release cycles, and they're driving the input chains to the equipment manufacturers. The components are not always radical either, e.g. 2mpixel to 3mpixel IC upgrade, which means that incremental revision of products is actually quite easy, it's not like a 12 month development cycle for completely new product, it's largely regression. And if you as Company X offer 3mp at the same pricepoint as Company Y 2mp, then consumers are not going to care too much and they'll move to X.
Don't forget that many consumers don't upgrade every 6 months, they might upgrade every 2 or 3 years - and each time they do, then you as a the manufacturer want to capture them when they are in that window.
My comment was directed to the "mislabelled" price, not the subsequent charging of his card (which, I agree, has some issues). A vendor can refuse to sell goods that are obviously mislabelled. Of course, vendor can also try some dirty tricks in this regard, but largely they don't get away with it. I have amazon, dell and other examples to back this up.
"I don't know what the laws are in the rest of the country but what you speak about is illegal here in New York. The store has to honor the price on the item and if the store refuses you can call the police."
It's certainly not like that in the UK, nor was it like that for Dell's online mishap, nor the same for Amazon.
I think you need to distinguish between regular advertised prices, and prices that are incorrectly labelled. If the store lists a $500 item for $50 less, then they are unlikely to succeed, but if they list a $4000 for $400, then they probably will.
Actually, BestBuy is in the right here. There have been other legal cases, and it's been established that your "purchase" is really an offer to the vendor to buy, and thus if the item is wrongly priced, they can refuse the offer -- some issues depend upon the exact working of the vendors terms and conditions of sale.
This is exactly what happens in a bricks and morter store: the goods on display are not on offer, the offer is when you take the good to the counter.
You can't take it out on BestBuy.
"Statistics don't change the facts that ..."
This is because the article fails to distinguish the difference between the number of bugs and the impact of those bugs.
The number seems (avoiding the arguments raised by other posters) actually relatively constant across all OSs.
The impact though, is significantly worse: because Windows bugs are actively exploited through Virus/Worms/etc and then have wide spread impact because of the sheer market size of the Windows, and the nature of the use of Windows.
To do a fair comparison of "impact analysis", you need to both look at the raw data (presented here), but then assess it in terms of number of expoits of those bugs, and then total overall impact. I think it will be clear that having done this, Windows will stick out by a mile.
However, the data does illustrate that the other OSs are not _intrinsically_ more secure than Windows, it's just that they don't receive as much attention. This means that if virus/worm writers focused on these other OSs or hackers actually targetted penetration of them, then the results would be no different that the problems seen with Windows today.
From another perspective, if you were thinking that your organisation may be the _active target_ of hackers, then choosing other OSs over Windows may not actually make much difference to your threat risk - you're just as vulnerable. However, if you're not the type of organisation that may be an _active target_, -- e.g. you're just a boring car rental paper-pushing company with Linux desktops -- then you'd actually be better off with the other OSs because of the far higher impact of bugs seen with Windows.
"This type of thing can get really confusing."
Of course, but lawyers understand them just as well as developers understand multiple-inheritance, polymorphism and dynamic dispatch.
"Say my next door neighbor works in an autoshop, and is under contract not to compete with his employer... so if I ask him to help me fix something on my car, is he commiting a crime?"
Possibly, but it depends on a number of factors. Did he just fix your car? Or does it fix other peoples cars as well? Does he use tools from the workplace? etc.
"What if he does just as a favor for me (no money changes hands), would that be more/less/the same of a crime?"
No different. A crime is a crime irrespective of whether you were paid to do it or not. Technically we're not talking about crime here, we're talking about breach of contract.
"If he stopped on the freeway and helped an old lady change a tire, is he now a criminal?"
I doubt it.
"Now of course "intellectual property" and the service of changing a tire are very different things, but when you look at computer code as the result of work done by a programmer, and a changed tire as the result of work done by an automechanic, what makes one persons work "intellectual property", and the other persons not?"
Huh? Underneath these issues are common issues law, liability and contract. Changing a tire has nothing to do with intellectual property, but it's still a breach of contract of service. The general rule is that an employer cannot restrain you from undertaking independent work, so long as that independent work is non-competitive and does not utilise time, effort and resources of the employer.
If the mechanic used workplace tools to change your tire, he could be in trouble. If he used his own tools, he's probably okay. If he's charging you money or getting something in return, it's probably okay so long as he's not making a regular business out of it.
Anyway, why I am explaining to you? Go read a book on law 101.
"the ftp client (called FTP.EXE) contains the following string: ... Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California."
You are wrong: stealing isn't when you use source code under an appropriate license - and the BSD license certainly allows for this. Try again.
"That's different."
Of course it's different, but it's a legitimate issue to raise now that we're talking about F/OSS and indemnification.
"And IANAL, but I really don't think an employer who had an employee contracted not to produce work for anyone other than the employer would be able to sue anyone besides the employee who broke contract."
It's clear that your not a lawyer, because the circumstances are blindingly obvious: employee "moonlights", then employer claims that employee contributed unauthorised works to a F/OSS project, so employer as owner of the works (because, employee's contract says so) can take action directly against projects in which works are embodied.
"This is one of the most ridiculus things about the SCO vs. AutoZone etc. cases: even assuming SCO has the rights to any source code used in Linux, why is AutoZone liable for that?"
Because AutoZone has the works in its possession and is in fact using the works: it doesn't matter about any intermediate chains. If you have a pirate DVD in your possession, it doesn't matter who pirated it for you, the copyright owner can take action against you (and of course, they can also take action against the pirate if they can get their hands on him/her).
"The inventor sued them, and won rightfully. I don't think he would have won if he had tried to sue someone who had bought or used a car that had windshield wipers."
He would have won just as easily: infringement occurs if you possess, not just manufacturer. But the point is, why try and take action against 100000 separate car owners, when you can take against against 1 large car manufacturer. This is about the practical economics of litigation. I'm surprised you don't understand it.
"They do in fact use other people's code on a regular basis...they outright steal things, knowingly."
That's a pretty bold and gutsy statement: can you back that up with evidence?
How many of you are reading this now, as paid daytime employees who write F/OSS software in the evenings, not aware of the Intellectual Property clauses in your employment contract, nor of the legal cases over direct or indirect (subconscious) copying of software - meaning that your day work could spill over into your evening work, meaning that you employer may actually have grounds to take you on in a law suit some day?
I'm not sure if there is a could hanging over F/OSS, but there certainly seem to risks that people are not aware of.
"The idea of restricting CPU's, or ANY form of computer software for that matter, is completly without justification."
Completely untrue. For a long time, the Wassenar agreements have prohibited exports of "dual use" technology, and this includes advanced technology. Naturally, as time goes on, the state of the art changes, so what was advanced technology yesterday, is not today. Continual review is needed.
But, it is without doubt the restricting supplies of advanced technologies does make things harder. Try design and simulation of advanced materials without the use of computing tools. Sure, you can do it, but at a snails pace. I mean, the simple example is that I'll set up a research lab with pentium based computing hardware and software, and you'll set up a lab using i386 based. Tell me who is going to be more productive ?
I see no problem with restricting supplies to "rogue states", but I do see lots of problems with identifying what are the rogue states, viz. the WMD fiasco with iraq.
"Unlike copyright, patent law is a purely economical law, so unless you have proof that more patents = better economy under all circumstances, denying patents in case of doubt does not necessarily go against the concept of the patent system."
Yes it does: you clearly didn't read my post nor think through the issue. If the benefit of the doubt doesn't go towards the inventor, then the patent office is going to throw away patents that it can't properly decide upon, but are actually valid. This would prevent things from being patentable.
As I stated, the real problem is the lack of opposition process: meaning that a "questionable" patent would be given the benefit of the doubt by the examiner, and then enter pre-publication and opposition phase, where it is open to the entire public, and this entire public which includes those at the top of their field, can then challenge the patent before it is granted (or, in a short period after grant).
The problem with the USPTO is that there is no decent opposition system. Introduce a more effective and workable opposition system, and watch the public (whether eff, patpub or other companies) take it up and use it to put a stop to bad patents. In doing so, this will start to make the patent office look bad (i.e. high rates of opposition), and provide some real/effective backpressure into the office to do something about the quality of its examinations. At the moment, there is no good "feedback" into the USPTO other than all of our ranting and raving and the "occasional" re-examination.
"There is definetly a large need to stop the excessive Patents."
In fact, I have been wondering recently whether anti-trust can be used here. In the EU, at least, the competition authorities are pretty good at pursuing activities that are detrimental to competition, and I'm waiting for someone to make the argument that this blue-chip process of mass-patent-filing and mass-cross-licensing is tantamount to a cartel ("the tragedy of the anti-commons") that excludeds others from effectively using patents.
It seems to me that a lot of these "dodgy" patents are the result of companies with too much budget aimed at patenting anything the engineers and the patent attorneys can think off. I used to read IEEE publications and think a lot of engineers with numerous awarded patents, but now being a bit older and wiser, I realise that if you work in a big blue-chip, the patent attorney's will help you pursue patents on anything and everything, even the most trivial patent that never returns its value.
But what the sum of all these patents do is give the blue-chip a huge arsenal it can use in the cross-licensing stakes with other blue-chips: and if they don't continue to build piles of patents, they'll miss out on the cross-licensing opportunities and be really shafted as legal teams from other blue-chips aim infringement canons for patents that may be trivial, but can chew up $millions in litigation time and expenses.
"But the majority of patents filed are not coming from independent inventors. They're coming from businesses either to try and take claim of some recent "innovation" (double-clicking or pushing a button) or as defensive patents."
We're talking about two separate problems here though. The problem of "giving the inventor the benefit of the doubt" is separate to the problem of "not effectively considering the patent against the state of the art".
We should never change the former, because it goes against the concept of the patent system, yet we should urgently fix the latter, because the lack of proper time/effort in assessing the patent is what is causing examiners to lean towards the former.
Getting rid of the former would be like changing the system from presumption of innocence to presumption of guilt. The problem with the latter is analogous to cops running around and stuffing people into shackles and prison cells without due cause ("shoot first, ask questions later"). The patent system is just as broken on the latter as is the law enforcement system wrt. ineffective anti-terrorism laws.
"2. The US government is pro-business (as it should be, IMHO). However, this translates into the default standing order at the USPTO being "accept", and not "reject" (whereas most /.'ers want to see "reject" as the default position)."
FYI
Giving the benefit of the doubt to the inventor is not "pro-business", it's because (and the same principle is followed in the EPO, and probably elsewhere) when the examiner can't tell one way or another, it should lean towards granting the patent: and if the patent is dodgy, then it will be resolved later.
The real problem is just that: in the EPO and elsewhere, there is a decent opposition system, where anyone can file and participate in opposing the patent. In the USPTO, the "re-examination" procedure is very limited and very poor.
I mean, just think of the scientist that comes up with an amazingly new novel way of doing something, but the examiner (who, you have to admit, could never be as on top of the field as a star scientist) isn't "quite" sure: denying the patent would be outrageous. By definition, inventions are novel and non-obvious: and that means "they go where no man has gone before", thus it's not surprising that figuring them out can sometimes be a problem.
Great onefor the lawyers: they earn a lump in prosecuting the patents, then leave the s**t hanging around for the chump techies to do free patent busting work.
If this is going to happen, it should be based on an _actively_ votable (i.e. "polling booth") list of patents (or, at least, patent areas) corresponding to important open source projects, e.g. "patents relating to scheduling improvements in operating systems". I think these are more important than "1-cluck shapping".
"So I'm going to go against your decision that this was the customer's fault for not closely monitoring a format change"
It's a case of "caveat emptor", or "let the buyer beware": on the one hand, you could blame eFax for the fault, but at the same time, as anyone who deals with business software knows, you always test first.