mod parent up - this is exactly the issue: convenience. And as a Californian who tries to follow the tax laws, it kills me every year to have to manually add up my online purchases and pay a use tax. Thanks Amazon - great convenience there for me. This is basically Amazon trying to help millions of my fellow citizens avoid following the law.
Does anybody know if such cross-licensing agreements survive a bankruptcy and a patent portfolio sale? (I suspect not, since they're contracts with a bankrupt corp.)
Existing contracts made before bankruptcy (and that are not fraudulent attempts to avoid creditors in anticipation of bankruptcy) survive bankruptcy. Now you might not get any money you are owed under the contract, but a company can't simply void contract deals in bankruptcy. If you're licensed to a patent, you will be licensed even after the patent ownership changes hands.
Better way to do it would be to make damages for infringement determined off of either lost profits (if you make a product) or a reasonable market-price based licensing fee. So, a troll who has never gotten anyone to pay for a license might only get a few dollars, while a university can point to their licensing contracts and get similar terms.
Do this too. What are damages based on now?
The crazy thing about this suggestion is that it is exactly how patent damages law is written right now. I quote thus:
Upon finding for the claimant the court shall award the claimant damages adequate to compensate for the infringement but in no event less than a reasonable royalty for the use made of the invention by the infringer, together with interest and costs as fixed by the court. 35 U.S.C. section 284
Lost profits or a reasonable, market-based licensing fee is exactly what the standard is now. The problem is that no one can "prove" what a reasonable, market-based license fee should be and it just gets thrown to a jury that has no idea what the reasonable award should be (jury awards $98 for every copy of MS Word due to infringement of patent on custom XML).
I think for most users the novelty of Facebook has worn off. I noticed this myself as well. When you first join, you start getting friended by all kinds of folks you used to know. Your curiosity is very high, and it's entertaining for a while. Then the months pass. Eventually you are rarely friended by anyone new. Most friends that will join and find you already have. And you've already reached out to most you know. Then it's just an endless stream to the same old friends posting about the same old things.
Still can be useful, but the novelty has worn off.
I think Facebook's greatest flaw (and Twitter's greatest strength) is that once you hit the roof on your friend list, there are few surprises. Whereas Twitter allows serendipitous exchanges precisely because it is public. Privacy is good - but it won't challenge you as much as openness. And that may get boring.
There is a better way to solve this given that both parties have some legitimate interest they want protected. Customers want the ability to complain, providers want the opportunity to remedy complaints before permanent comments are published. So enter into a contract that says that customers will give providers a week's written notice before they publish a negative review, and an opportunity for the provider to remedy any perceived defect in the service. That kind of agreement shouldn't rankle either party too much AND would probably lead to happier transactions to boot.
Yup. You don't get to release a product to the public and then 20 years later try and go patent it. You've got one year from the release of the product to file for a patent. If not, you are out of luck.
From the Federal Circuit opinion describing the damages calculation:
"[H]e first chose an appropriate "benchmark" in order to value Microsoft's use of the claimed invention at the time of the hypothetical negotiation. Wagner chose a product called XMetaL as his benchmark, which had a retail price of $499. To calculate the licensing fee, Wagner multiplied the price of XMetaL ($499) by Microsoft's profit margin (76.6%), based on his assumption that any licensing fee would be a fraction of the profits. Wagner then applied the 25-percent rule to this number, which assumes the inventor will keep 25% of the profits from any infringing sales. This resulted in a baseline royalty rate of $96."
So basically take a specialized program that sells for $500, apply Microsoft's entire profit margin to it, and then take 25% of that. The answer to your question is that this is just a number someone made up choosing some arbitrary anchor points to make it sound superficially like "analysis."
The issue here is more than about infringement or validity. One of the biggest problems in patent law is lack of predictability in how much a valid, infringed patent is actually worth. How much should Microsoft pay? Here, they're being ordered to pay $98 per copy of Word over a little used feature. Now, admittedly, Microsoft isn't appealing that determination due to some technical snafus (also a big controversy). But it's not like this is a meritorious result.
I hate patent trolls as much as the next guy, but it's a little misleading to complain about being hauled into the U.S. legal system as a foreigner. U.S. patents only have legal effect for U.S. sales. If you sell significant enough quantities to make a patent suit worthwhile in the U.S., you've got a decent U.S. presence. That said, congratulations for beating a troll in East Texas - and before trial no less. Not an easy thing to do.
I recommend you read arstechnica's rebuttal of Steve Jobs's claims.
I want my five minutes back. This editorial is terrible. Jobs made a distinction between proprietary standards for content on the web and proprietary tools to access that content. This editorial completely glosses over that distinction and argues that all proprietary software is bad. Seriously? I'm all for touting the benefits of open source and free software but there's a place for proprietary software as well. If you don't like the iphone's proprietary software, buy another phone. It's not like there aren't plenty of options.
In California, most defendants have a right to trial within 60 days. (Cal. Penal Code section 1382.) I'm not familiar with the details of this case, but he almost certainly waived his right to a speedy trial so that he could prepare. That's typical for defendants in high stakes cases, especially in highly technical cases or when you have an overworked public defender. You'd rather make sure you can get it right than push for trial and end up spending a lot longer behind bars.
I can't even come close to replicating these photographs myself, but there are even more incredible examples of amateurs doing amazing space photography with relatively simple equipment. There are a couple of these geniuses in the SF Bay Area. One I'm familiar with is Rogelio Bernal Andreo. He is a fixture at astro sites around the Bay, and his photographs are simply jaw dropping. I believe most of his magic happens on the back end in the digital processing. His set up easily packs into his car.
I always thought Nintendo had nailed the feeling of getting more powerful while still being challenged in games like Metroid and Zelda by showing players a lot of the level without letting them get to it. Then on your second pass through the world, your new skills/tools allowed to you explore a lot more even while feeling challenged because the creatures were harder to kill. By the time you took your third/fourth pass through the level, you were probably either flying (literally) or could use some kind of other tool to basically go anywhere you wanted to. Definitely gave a sense of leveling up.
The original award was $25 per car. On remand, the district court quadrupled it to $98 per car. It's buried in the second link I know, but look at the first paragraph on page 16. That sums up the court's findings. This award will be appealed as well, but it's more likely to hold.
at least Toyota banks mad cash on their prius in the mean time.
Actually, that's sort of the problem for Toyota. They got hit with a patent judgment over their hybrid vehicles in eastern Texas a couple of years ago. The plaintiff was awarded nearly $100 a vehicle as an on-going royalty (which is about 17% of Toyota's relatively slim profit margin).
So I agree. Kudos to Toyota for playing the game like it should be played. They got hit pretty hard and they needed to fight fire with fire. Good for them.
The fundamental inquiry is whether you want a human in the control loop during a crisis. And I think the answer is unequivocally: it depends on the crisis. No mystery here. The answer has got to be a smart hybrid of the two systems. I have no idea whether Boeing or Airbus has a better hybrid system but would love to know.
As an aside, I hate the pilot vs. computer characterization. It's pilot vs. team of engineers. Let's not anthropomorphize the computer. It's not "making" decisions. It's just the difference between a human on the plane with little time to respond versus a team of humans not on the plane with a ton of time to think of various scenarios and simulate outcomes. It's not clear to me that one will always have the advantage.
Blaming the victim sounds harsh when the article indicates that the failure to wear protective clothing was systemic:
The 15-page report cites a deficiency in the department's records of safety and health training on exposure to hazardous chemicals. It notes that a safety inspection of the Harran lab by UCLA on 30 October had "identified [the failure of employees to wear required protective clothing] and recommended that laboratory coats must be worn while conducting research and handling hazardous materials in the laboratory."
A patent is supposed to protect a commercial product from being copied by the market.
No, a copyright protects your product from copying. A patent is a reward for (1) innovating; and (2) teaching others how to make and use your innovation. Probably the biggest misconception in patent law is that it's about stealing technology.
Basic Legal Misconceptions re: Patents
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
IAAL - a patent lawyer to be precise. Here's what I would love all jurors and engineers to know.
(1) A patent case is almost never about stealing someone else's technology. Most lay people don't understand this and think that if you've been accused of patent infringement it's because you stole their technology. (Note that the other side will still accuse you of stealing their technology.)
(2) Patent cases are civil cases and must be proven only by a preponderance of the evidence. This is not the "beyond a reasonable doubt standard" we hear about more often.
(3) Invalidity must be proven by a higher standard - clear and convincing evidence - because there is a (largely unjustified) presumption that the Patent Office got it right.
(4) The *claims* of a patent (those numbered paragraphs at the end) define the invention, not the stuff that comes before it. Just because the patent describes a particular device doesn't mean they are limited to that device. Read the claims. (There are naturally some subtleties here.)
(5) Major patent cases that involve fundamental technologies are like death penalty cases for companies because, if they are found to infringe a valid patent, the Court can order them to stop (called an injunction). This could naturally wreck your business. So even if you are 90% sure (which is an absurdly high confidence level) that you will not infringe or will invalidate a patent, it might still be completely rational to settle. By way of example, if I told you there was a 90% chance that you will cross a street and not get hit by a bus, would that inspire confidence? What if you had to cross the street 10 times a year? It doesn't mean you thought the patentee had a good case.
Anyways, there are a lot of these. This is a great idea.
If you can still control WHEN it collapses, can't you send information as long as both sides have awesome time references? E.g., if it collapses on an even second, it's a 1, and if it collapses on an odd second, it's a 0. I understand that practical applications would be enormously complex, but it seems like you should be able to send information in principle if you can control some aspect of it.
Whatever about morality and ethics. Morality never motivates weapons design. If some other country builds an army of killer robots, we'll build one too.
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mod parent up - this is exactly the issue: convenience. And as a Californian who tries to follow the tax laws, it kills me every year to have to manually add up my online purchases and pay a use tax. Thanks Amazon - great convenience there for me. This is basically Amazon trying to help millions of my fellow citizens avoid following the law.
Does anybody know if such cross-licensing agreements survive a bankruptcy and a patent portfolio sale? (I suspect not, since they're contracts with a bankrupt corp.)
Existing contracts made before bankruptcy (and that are not fraudulent attempts to avoid creditors in anticipation of bankruptcy) survive bankruptcy. Now you might not get any money you are owed under the contract, but a company can't simply void contract deals in bankruptcy. If you're licensed to a patent, you will be licensed even after the patent ownership changes hands.
Better way to do it would be to make damages for infringement determined off of either lost profits (if you make a product) or a reasonable market-price based licensing fee. So, a troll who has never gotten anyone to pay for a license might only get a few dollars, while a university can point to their licensing contracts and get similar terms.
Do this too. What are damages based on now?
The crazy thing about this suggestion is that it is exactly how patent damages law is written right now. I quote thus:
Upon finding for the claimant the court shall award the claimant damages adequate to compensate for the infringement but in no event less than a reasonable royalty for the use made of the invention by the infringer, together with interest and costs as fixed by the court. 35 U.S.C. section 284
Lost profits or a reasonable, market-based licensing fee is exactly what the standard is now. The problem is that no one can "prove" what a reasonable, market-based license fee should be and it just gets thrown to a jury that has no idea what the reasonable award should be (jury awards $98 for every copy of MS Word due to infringement of patent on custom XML).
I think for most users the novelty of Facebook has worn off. I noticed this myself as well. When you first join, you start getting friended by all kinds of folks you used to know. Your curiosity is very high, and it's entertaining for a while. Then the months pass. Eventually you are rarely friended by anyone new. Most friends that will join and find you already have. And you've already reached out to most you know. Then it's just an endless stream to the same old friends posting about the same old things.
Still can be useful, but the novelty has worn off.
I think Facebook's greatest flaw (and Twitter's greatest strength) is that once you hit the roof on your friend list, there are few surprises. Whereas Twitter allows serendipitous exchanges precisely because it is public. Privacy is good - but it won't challenge you as much as openness. And that may get boring.
There is a better way to solve this given that both parties have some legitimate interest they want protected. Customers want the ability to complain, providers want the opportunity to remedy complaints before permanent comments are published. So enter into a contract that says that customers will give providers a week's written notice before they publish a negative review, and an opportunity for the provider to remedy any perceived defect in the service. That kind of agreement shouldn't rankle either party too much AND would probably lead to happier transactions to boot.
Yup. You don't get to release a product to the public and then 20 years later try and go patent it. You've got one year from the release of the product to file for a patent. If not, you are out of luck.
From the Federal Circuit opinion describing the damages calculation: "[H]e first chose an appropriate "benchmark" in order to value Microsoft's use of the claimed invention at the time of the hypothetical negotiation. Wagner chose a product called XMetaL as his benchmark, which had a retail price of $499. To calculate the licensing fee, Wagner multiplied the price of XMetaL ($499) by Microsoft's profit margin (76.6%), based on his assumption that any licensing fee would be a fraction of the profits. Wagner then applied the 25-percent rule to this number, which assumes the inventor will keep 25% of the profits from any infringing sales. This resulted in a baseline royalty rate of $96." So basically take a specialized program that sells for $500, apply Microsoft's entire profit margin to it, and then take 25% of that. The answer to your question is that this is just a number someone made up choosing some arbitrary anchor points to make it sound superficially like "analysis."
The issue here is more than about infringement or validity. One of the biggest problems in patent law is lack of predictability in how much a valid, infringed patent is actually worth. How much should Microsoft pay? Here, they're being ordered to pay $98 per copy of Word over a little used feature. Now, admittedly, Microsoft isn't appealing that determination due to some technical snafus (also a big controversy). But it's not like this is a meritorious result.
I hate patent trolls as much as the next guy, but it's a little misleading to complain about being hauled into the U.S. legal system as a foreigner. U.S. patents only have legal effect for U.S. sales. If you sell significant enough quantities to make a patent suit worthwhile in the U.S., you've got a decent U.S. presence. That said, congratulations for beating a troll in East Texas - and before trial no less. Not an easy thing to do.
I recommend you read arstechnica's rebuttal of Steve Jobs's claims.
I want my five minutes back. This editorial is terrible. Jobs made a distinction between proprietary standards for content on the web and proprietary tools to access that content. This editorial completely glosses over that distinction and argues that all proprietary software is bad. Seriously? I'm all for touting the benefits of open source and free software but there's a place for proprietary software as well. If you don't like the iphone's proprietary software, buy another phone. It's not like there aren't plenty of options.
In California, most defendants have a right to trial within 60 days. (Cal. Penal Code section 1382.) I'm not familiar with the details of this case, but he almost certainly waived his right to a speedy trial so that he could prepare. That's typical for defendants in high stakes cases, especially in highly technical cases or when you have an overworked public defender. You'd rather make sure you can get it right than push for trial and end up spending a lot longer behind bars.
I can't even come close to replicating these photographs myself, but there are even more incredible examples of amateurs doing amazing space photography with relatively simple equipment. There are a couple of these geniuses in the SF Bay Area. One I'm familiar with is Rogelio Bernal Andreo. He is a fixture at astro sites around the Bay, and his photographs are simply jaw dropping. I believe most of his magic happens on the back end in the digital processing. His set up easily packs into his car.
Check some of these out: http://blog.deepskycolors.com/nebulas.html
Then why does congress get this kind of protection when private citizens suspected of a crime do not?
They do. It's called a Grand Jury. Although sometimes the media gets the information anyway, like in this case.
I always thought Nintendo had nailed the feeling of getting more powerful while still being challenged in games like Metroid and Zelda by showing players a lot of the level without letting them get to it. Then on your second pass through the world, your new skills/tools allowed to you explore a lot more even while feeling challenged because the creatures were harder to kill. By the time you took your third/fourth pass through the level, you were probably either flying (literally) or could use some kind of other tool to basically go anywhere you wanted to. Definitely gave a sense of leveling up.
The original award was $25 per car. On remand, the district court quadrupled it to $98 per car. It's buried in the second link I know, but look at the first paragraph on page 16. That sums up the court's findings. This award will be appealed as well, but it's more likely to hold.
at least Toyota banks mad cash on their prius in the mean time.
Actually, that's sort of the problem for Toyota. They got hit with a patent judgment over their hybrid vehicles in eastern Texas a couple of years ago. The plaintiff was awarded nearly $100 a vehicle as an on-going royalty (which is about 17% of Toyota's relatively slim profit margin).
So I agree. Kudos to Toyota for playing the game like it should be played. They got hit pretty hard and they needed to fight fire with fire. Good for them.
This is exactly right. A jury really doesn't like it when you lie to their face.
Um, no. For lying under oath she deserves to face perjury charges, not have her punishment be magnified 1000 times.
I don't know. I think I'd rather just file for bankruptcy and move on than be brought up on criminal charges.
The fundamental inquiry is whether you want a human in the control loop during a crisis. And I think the answer is unequivocally: it depends on the crisis. No mystery here. The answer has got to be a smart hybrid of the two systems. I have no idea whether Boeing or Airbus has a better hybrid system but would love to know.
As an aside, I hate the pilot vs. computer characterization. It's pilot vs. team of engineers. Let's not anthropomorphize the computer. It's not "making" decisions. It's just the difference between a human on the plane with little time to respond versus a team of humans not on the plane with a ton of time to think of various scenarios and simulate outcomes. It's not clear to me that one will always have the advantage.
The 15-page report cites a deficiency in the department's records of safety and health training on exposure to hazardous chemicals. It notes that a safety inspection of the Harran lab by UCLA on 30 October had "identified [the failure of employees to wear required protective clothing] and recommended that laboratory coats must be worn while conducting research and handling hazardous materials in the laboratory."
NPR did a related story on the endurance of typewriters as well: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100900163 There does seem to be something about that physicality and sound that people enjoy.
A patent is supposed to protect a commercial product from being copied by the market.
No, a copyright protects your product from copying. A patent is a reward for (1) innovating; and (2) teaching others how to make and use your innovation. Probably the biggest misconception in patent law is that it's about stealing technology.
IAAL - a patent lawyer to be precise. Here's what I would love all jurors and engineers to know.
(1) A patent case is almost never about stealing someone else's technology. Most lay people don't understand this and think that if you've been accused of patent infringement it's because you stole their technology. (Note that the other side will still accuse you of stealing their technology.)
(2) Patent cases are civil cases and must be proven only by a preponderance of the evidence. This is not the "beyond a reasonable doubt standard" we hear about more often.
(3) Invalidity must be proven by a higher standard - clear and convincing evidence - because there is a (largely unjustified) presumption that the Patent Office got it right.
(4) The *claims* of a patent (those numbered paragraphs at the end) define the invention, not the stuff that comes before it. Just because the patent describes a particular device doesn't mean they are limited to that device. Read the claims. (There are naturally some subtleties here.)
(5) Major patent cases that involve fundamental technologies are like death penalty cases for companies because, if they are found to infringe a valid patent, the Court can order them to stop (called an injunction). This could naturally wreck your business. So even if you are 90% sure (which is an absurdly high confidence level) that you will not infringe or will invalidate a patent, it might still be completely rational to settle. By way of example, if I told you there was a 90% chance that you will cross a street and not get hit by a bus, would that inspire confidence? What if you had to cross the street 10 times a year? It doesn't mean you thought the patentee had a good case.
Anyways, there are a lot of these. This is a great idea.
IANAP but am curious.
If you can still control WHEN it collapses, can't you send information as long as both sides have awesome time references? E.g., if it collapses on an even second, it's a 1, and if it collapses on an odd second, it's a 0. I understand that practical applications would be enormously complex, but it seems like you should be able to send information in principle if you can control some aspect of it.
Will someone else do it first?
Whatever about morality and ethics. Morality never motivates weapons design. If some other country builds an army of killer robots, we'll build one too.