I'd bet one big advantage of Lego is that it helps avoid any RF interference caused by metallic structures. That's a big deal if your goal is to test the strength/efficiency/pattern of the radiation. In fact that may have been what gave him the idea to begin with.
Don't bother submitting to the USPTO unless you like paying fees. Mail a copy of the reference to the inventors and the assignee on the patent and a letter that says this is prior art you idiots. Copy the prosecuting attorney of the patent (can find this out by going to the USPTO PAIR system, entering the application number, and clicking on the tab for attorney).
If they ever sue on it, they will be asked about prior art that they know, and it will come out. It's much easier to tag the patentee with the prior art than any other entity because then it at least follows the patent around. I am a patent litigator so I know of what I speak.
I'll respond to this comment for the sake of open discussion, but I don't think we're really talking to each other.
mp3's are quite surely artifically scarce; they're just not as artificially scarce as the content holders would like them to be. If they weren't scarce at all, then we'd all have any copy of any song we wanted for free. As it is, even the illegal downloads require some effort to find the right song and you do take some risk (however minimal) in downloading it at all. But this is besides the point, which is that lots of valuable things are "artifically" scarce.
I'm not sure how you can say that virtual property has no value at all if such virtual property is actually being traded for real value in the real world. So I don't quite understand the point. It seems obvious that the virtual property has actual value and this is what leads to the discussion.
Finally, I have no idea whether an mmorpg is a free market or not, and I don't really care. The point is that the virtual property is sold in the real world and the resources required to obtain it (time) comes from the real world. And the real world here in the U.S. is more free market than not. So people will tend to create value that other people want. If that value is virtual property, I have no problem with it.
Artificial scarcity is not a useful concept. Lots of things are "artifically" scarce. Just look at mp3's and money. These are "artifically" scarce because some regulatory body punishes "non-authentic" copies. But the authentic copies still directly represent valuable resources. Indeed, they *can* represent valuable resources precisely because they are artifically scarce.
Virtual property is valuable because of the time required to get it, and we don't tell people how to spend their time anymore (mostly). That's left to Adam Smith's Invisible Hand.
Everything is a game. Some games just have real consequences and those games are in real life. Some games don't have real consequences, and those games are categorized into playtime.
At some point I think it is natural to transition away from video or board games because you start having the ability to dabble in bigger games with more serious consequences and greater rewards. The dating game. The parent game. The stock market game. The career game.
It's probably just as natural to start going back to those things when you have children because they use those playtime games to learn.
But it is nice to occasionally go back to games without consequences. Playing is a hell of a lot of fun, precisely because it gives you the opportunity to explore and try new things without (a) getting an STD; (b) screwing up your child's life; (c) losing all your money; or (d) getting fired.
The "Method of Swinging on a Swing" patent was subsequency invalidated on reexamination by the way, a fact that is frequently not mentioned when holding it up as an example of a bad patent.
See Swinging Reexamination Certificate (see page 7 if the link doesn't work).
I can't explain why the other patent is still valid.
Design patents and copyright are different forms of protection. For one, you don't have to "copy" the design to infringe under a design patent - you could have developed it independently and would still infringe. Under copyright law, you actually had to have copied it.
So what about the kids who simply don't want to read or do algebra? There are people out there for whom that type of activity is dreadful. They may be afflicted by dyslexia or some other learning disability. They will not have fun as programmers, teachers, or salesmen even if they could do it. There are a lot of these kids. And forcing them to be a salesman or a teacher or a scientist is what makes them unhappy and drop out of school in the first place. There are plenty of valuable skills that one can learn that do not require algebra or high school literacy. We just don't teach most of them until they've "failed" real school. Not knowing algebra or Shakespeare doesn't make you stupid. But not having any valuable skills at all makes it hard to support yourself.
I'm sorry, but "you just have to make him do it" could be about the worst educational advice I've ever heard. You're right that you have to light a passion in kids. And the teacher that does that is just as often the drama teacher or the football coach as the chemistry teacher. Not every kid has a passion for algebra. And if that's all you teach and all you test, the kid will conclude, hey, maybe school's not for me. And who could blame him?
* separation of teaching from learning -- mostly in real life, people become experts and learn things when they turn around and teach others. Almost never are high school students given the chance to teach what they learn, and almost never are their rewards for them in teaching others.
This is pretty close to my view of it. If education was more directly applicable to their real lives, then students would stay longer. We need to focus less on the abstract and more on the vocational and practical. Teach kids useful skills that they can use immediately and you'll solve two problems. First, if they do drop out, they will be more useful. Second, it will show them the value of education.
We focus too much on abstract math and english. That's great for the kids (like most of us) that went on to use that knowledge to gain much more sophisticated skills. But a lot of kids are never going to do that and we fail to provide useful education for them. That's our fault, not theirs.
Yes, drawing and quartering the man would certainly be a disproportionate response to the crime. But depriving someone of liberty for the crime of property theft is not disproportionate. Fines and other monetary sanctions are often insufficient to deter individuals from crime, and society does have a right to use the criminal justice system for deterrence.
The mere fact that you are all discussing the harshness of his sentence very nearly justifies at least one goal of criminal justice system: deterrence.
It's in fact inaccurate to speak of any legal/illegal distinction. This is simply about breaching a contract, and breach of contract is not illegal. You can be sued on it for sure, but it's not illegal in the sense that it is prohibited by law. You just have to pay damages resulting from your breach. (And there are even legal scholars who argue that sometimes you *should* breach; it's called efficient breach.)
In any case, the only way this could be construed as illegal is if it were actually fraud, which in California means that you have intentionally made an untrue representation which the other party believed, relied upon, and suffered damage as a result of. To nail you for that, someone would have to argue that your clicking (or downloading of) a link is a representation that you will see or read the result. And I don't think they would be successful with that argument. So go for it.
Resorting to holding up the pharmaceutical industry as an example of why intellectual "property" needs special protection actually demonstrates the reverse, since pharmcos spend more than twice as much on advertising as they do on R&D.
And they would spend neither if they had no patent rights.
>>There has to be some way to protect intellectual effort
>It's called payment for service. It works perfectly well and requires only limited government >enforcement.
You assume that someone hired you to perform a service. Need I point out that much inventorship is done on peoples' own time? Now when you go and try to sell that invention to someone, what's to prevent them from saying, "No thanks. We can make that for much less than you're trying to sell it for. But thanks for the idea and design."
There has to be some way to protect intellectual effort and the first people that will tell you this are the drug companies which spend a tremendous amount of money finding how certain molecules will do certain things and not kill the humans that ingest them. Easy to copy those molecules and all that information unless they have a patent.
Frankly the patent office just doesn't have the time to thoroughly review the patent applications that come in. If you are serious about this subject, read Lemley's analysis of the Patent Office's "Rational Ignorance": http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =261400. ("It is common to assert that the Patent and Trademark Office does a bad job of examining patents, and that it should spend more time and money weeding out bad patents. . . . [The fact is] that very few patents are actually litigated or licensed; most simply sit on a shelf unused, or are used only for noncontroversial purposes like financing. Because of this, society would be better off spending its resources in a more searching judicial inquiry into validity in those few cases in which it matters than paying for a more protracted examination of all patents ex ante. In economic terms, the patent office is 'rationally ignorant' of the objective validity of the patents it issues.")
Yes, that patent system has flaws. So do all human endeavors. The same can be true for trial by jury, taxes, and democracy. But it's not as bad as people in the software industry make it out to be. If a patent is truly invalid, you have the chance to say so to the judge. It's not like it's the Wild West out there.
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I'd bet one big advantage of Lego is that it helps avoid any RF interference caused by metallic structures. That's a big deal if your goal is to test the strength/efficiency/pattern of the radiation. In fact that may have been what gave him the idea to begin with.
Don't bother submitting to the USPTO unless you like paying fees. Mail a copy of the reference to the inventors and the assignee on the patent and a letter that says this is prior art you idiots. Copy the prosecuting attorney of the patent (can find this out by going to the USPTO PAIR system, entering the application number, and clicking on the tab for attorney).
If they ever sue on it, they will be asked about prior art that they know, and it will come out. It's much easier to tag the patentee with the prior art than any other entity because then it at least follows the patent around. I am a patent litigator so I know of what I speak.
I think it's safe to say this guy has the time and inclination.
mp3's are quite surely artifically scarce; they're just not as artificially scarce as the content holders would like them to be. If they weren't scarce at all, then we'd all have any copy of any song we wanted for free. As it is, even the illegal downloads require some effort to find the right song and you do take some risk (however minimal) in downloading it at all. But this is besides the point, which is that lots of valuable things are "artifically" scarce.
I'm not sure how you can say that virtual property has no value at all if such virtual property is actually being traded for real value in the real world. So I don't quite understand the point. It seems obvious that the virtual property has actual value and this is what leads to the discussion.
Finally, I have no idea whether an mmorpg is a free market or not, and I don't really care. The point is that the virtual property is sold in the real world and the resources required to obtain it (time) comes from the real world. And the real world here in the U.S. is more free market than not. So people will tend to create value that other people want. If that value is virtual property, I have no problem with it.
Virtual property is valuable because of the time required to get it, and we don't tell people how to spend their time anymore (mostly). That's left to Adam Smith's Invisible Hand.
Everything is a game. Some games just have real consequences and those games are in real life. Some games don't have real consequences, and those games are categorized into playtime.
At some point I think it is natural to transition away from video or board games because you start having the ability to dabble in bigger games with more serious consequences and greater rewards. The dating game. The parent game. The stock market game. The career game.
It's probably just as natural to start going back to those things when you have children because they use those playtime games to learn.
But it is nice to occasionally go back to games without consequences. Playing is a hell of a lot of fun, precisely because it gives you the opportunity to explore and try new things without (a) getting an STD; (b) screwing up your child's life; (c) losing all your money; or (d) getting fired.
The "Method of Swinging on a Swing" patent was subsequency invalidated on reexamination by the way, a fact that is frequently not mentioned when holding it up as an example of a bad patent. See Swinging Reexamination Certificate (see page 7 if the link doesn't work). I can't explain why the other patent is still valid.
Design patents and copyright are different forms of protection. For one, you don't have to "copy" the design to infringe under a design patent - you could have developed it independently and would still infringe. Under copyright law, you actually had to have copied it.
So what about the kids who simply don't want to read or do algebra? There are people out there for whom that type of activity is dreadful. They may be afflicted by dyslexia or some other learning disability. They will not have fun as programmers, teachers, or salesmen even if they could do it. There are a lot of these kids. And forcing them to be a salesman or a teacher or a scientist is what makes them unhappy and drop out of school in the first place. There are plenty of valuable skills that one can learn that do not require algebra or high school literacy. We just don't teach most of them until they've "failed" real school. Not knowing algebra or Shakespeare doesn't make you stupid. But not having any valuable skills at all makes it hard to support yourself.
I'm sorry, but "you just have to make him do it" could be about the worst educational advice I've ever heard. You're right that you have to light a passion in kids. And the teacher that does that is just as often the drama teacher or the football coach as the chemistry teacher. Not every kid has a passion for algebra. And if that's all you teach and all you test, the kid will conclude, hey, maybe school's not for me. And who could blame him?
* separation of teaching from learning -- mostly in real life, people become experts and learn things when they turn around and teach others. Almost never are high school students given the chance to teach what they learn, and almost never are their rewards for them in teaching others.
This is pretty close to my view of it. If education was more directly applicable to their real lives, then students would stay longer. We need to focus less on the abstract and more on the vocational and practical. Teach kids useful skills that they can use immediately and you'll solve two problems. First, if they do drop out, they will be more useful. Second, it will show them the value of education.
We focus too much on abstract math and english. That's great for the kids (like most of us) that went on to use that knowledge to gain much more sophisticated skills. But a lot of kids are never going to do that and we fail to provide useful education for them. That's our fault, not theirs.
Yes, drawing and quartering the man would certainly be a disproportionate response to the crime. But depriving someone of liberty for the crime of property theft is not disproportionate. Fines and other monetary sanctions are often insufficient to deter individuals from crime, and society does have a right to use the criminal justice system for deterrence.
The mere fact that you are all discussing the harshness of his sentence very nearly justifies at least one goal of criminal justice system: deterrence.
It's in fact inaccurate to speak of any legal/illegal distinction. This is simply about breaching a contract, and breach of contract is not illegal. You can be sued on it for sure, but it's not illegal in the sense that it is prohibited by law. You just have to pay damages resulting from your breach. (And there are even legal scholars who argue that sometimes you *should* breach; it's called efficient breach.)
In any case, the only way this could be construed as illegal is if it were actually fraud, which in California means that you have intentionally made an untrue representation which the other party believed, relied upon, and suffered damage as a result of. To nail you for that, someone would have to argue that your clicking (or downloading of) a link is a representation that you will see or read the result. And I don't think they would be successful with that argument. So go for it.
So we can all refer to it now as Wii3!
And they would spend neither if they had no patent rights.
>>There has to be some way to protect intellectual effort
>It's called payment for service. It works perfectly well and requires only limited government
>enforcement.
You assume that someone hired you to perform a service. Need I point out that much inventorship is done on peoples' own time? Now when you go and try to sell that invention to someone, what's to prevent them from saying, "No thanks. We can make that for much less than you're trying to sell it for. But thanks for the idea and design."
There has to be some way to protect intellectual effort and the first people that will tell you this are the drug companies which spend a tremendous amount of money finding how certain molecules will do certain things and not kill the humans that ingest them. Easy to copy those molecules and all that information unless they have a patent.
d =261400. ("It is common to assert that the Patent and Trademark Office does a bad job of examining patents, and that it should spend more time and money weeding out bad patents. . . . [The fact is] that very few patents are actually litigated or licensed; most simply sit on a shelf unused, or are used only for noncontroversial purposes like financing. Because of this, society would be better off spending its resources in a more searching judicial inquiry into validity in those few cases in which it matters than paying for a more protracted examination of all patents ex ante. In economic terms, the patent office is 'rationally ignorant' of the objective validity of the patents it issues.")
Frankly the patent office just doesn't have the time to thoroughly review the patent applications that come in. If you are serious about this subject, read Lemley's analysis of the Patent Office's "Rational Ignorance": http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_i
Yes, that patent system has flaws. So do all human endeavors. The same can be true for trial by jury, taxes, and democracy. But it's not as bad as people in the software industry make it out to be. If a patent is truly invalid, you have the chance to say so to the judge. It's not like it's the Wild West out there.