Face it, they're just trying to slow down the DVD pirates and I don't see anything incredibly wrong with that. It does look damn suspicious for a guy to turn around 3-5 movies a day and honestly claim he's NOT pirating them and just shipping them back as soon as his DVD ripper is done grabbing the movie. I'm sure there's a small percentage of legitimate people out there that really do nothing else all day but watch movies from sun up to sun down and they don't have cable or satellite, but they're few and far between.
I must have missed the day where the contracts professor taught that a contract ment one thing for a "good" customer and another thing for a "bad" customer even though both customers were honoring the terms of the contract.
Netflix advertises:
With Netflix you can rent as many DVDs as you want from the comfort of your home and have them delivered to your door in about 1 business day! There are no late fees and no due dates, and shipping is free both ways. Plans start at $9.99 plus any applicable tax. With our most popular plan, 3 at-a-time (Unlimited), you can rent as many DVDs as you want for just $17.99 a month plus any applicable tax. You keep a revolving library of up to 3 DVDs at a time and can exchange them for new available DVDs as often as you like. There are no additional charges.
So long as they continue to advertise these terms and act upon other terms, whether it's in the contract or not, they are subject to suits for false advertising and unfair competition. The existing class action suit (which has not been tried or settled yet) only affects people who were Netflix customers on or before Jan 15, 2005. If you don't like the way that Netflix is conducting business, and you're not covered by the existing class, feel free to sue them again.
The GPL 3 is anti-DRM in a big way, and Linus doesn't agree with that, fair enough. However another aspect of it is to prevent someone from taking GPL code, and designing a hardware/software combo that will only run using unmodified versions of the code. In such an instance, they use GPL code, but their modifications are useless to the rest of the world because we can't modify their version and run it on the device. Basically they break Linus' "quid pro quo" rule. Thus part of what GPL 3 is trying to do is exactly what Linus says he believes in.
Their modifications are not useless to the world. Their modifications are disclosed to the world, which means that the world can construct an identical hardware device that will run unsigned code and use the disclosed code, or the world can adapt the disclosed code to run on similar hardware devices that will run unsigned code.
GPL2 requires you to share the software with others. GPL3 would require you to share the hardware with others. This is a significant change to the ethic that you've labeled as the "quid pro quo" rule. Even if you disagree that it is a change, I don't believe that you can accurately contend that Linus has announced that he believes in the shared hardware ethic, nor that Linus even secretly believes in the shared hardware ethic. Linus spent a significant portion of his career working at a company that sold an essentially closed hardware platform (Transmeta CPUs), which suggests that he doesn't hew to quite the same muse as RMS.
First, while you are in patent pending, you are protected.
You are only protected after your application is published, and only if you have not substantially altered the scope of the claims while you're before the USPTO. A published claim must have substantially the same scope as an issued claim, or there is no practical protection. This not necessarily an easy task when there is extensive prior art. If you file an application blindly (also relevant to your second point below), it is practically impossible.
Second, Patents are not expensive, paten lawyers are. You can file a patent as an individual for a few hundred dollars.
The filing fee is $395 for an individual, assuming that you qualify as a small entity. The filing fee cannot get you a patent. If you prosecute the application perfectly, meaning everything you need is in the specification (no affidavits or declarations), you argue allowable claims within two office actions (not an easy task, it is not uncommon for an examiner to be wrong, and they do not tend to "roll over" as some suggest), and you ask for no extensions of time to make your arguments, the typical patent itself will cost you an additional $1000 (issue fee and publication fee).
If you file an application without performing a patentability search and analysis, you are almost guaranteed to obtain an inferior patent (no pre-grant protection, claims that can only be interpreted literally) or no patent at all. A search costs ~$500 in a simple case. The time spent analyzing the results will at least equal that, unless your opportunity cost for your time is $0.
Patent lawyers are expensive because patent law is hard. The USPTO offers free copies of past patent bar examinations with answers here. You need to score 70% or better to pass, i.e. be minimally competent, and you need to complete the examination in 6 hours or less. Good luck.
Third, a patent is a way of saying you had it first, but there are other ways.
True. But most people seeking patents claim that they are not only seeking notoriety. Patent grants rights. Publishing your paper on the internet grants others the ability to copy you mercilessly. People who come up with truly novel and non-obvious inventions typically prefer to obtain rights.
Forth, This would be even more abused then the current system
I don't have an opinion on this, at least not yet. Many European countries have had petit patent systems for historically significant periods of time. Literature discussing the experiences in those countries would be a good place to being if you want to form an informed opinion.
I just know that someone is going to slam me for using "final judgment" in a lay sense, probably for using "final judgment" incorrectly in the legal sense.
The decision of the trial court after a verdict, motions, and all the rest is legally called a "final judgment". However, an appeal could result in an order that changes or could change the final judgment before it can be fully applied to the parties in the case. Strictly speaking, that's called enforcement and satisfaction. We all learned this in law school. Slashdot posters generally haven't, and are probably getting the same glassy stare that most would get if I began reciting the Old Testament in Aramaic. 'Nuf said.
Allegedly? No...not allegedly, definitively. It went to court, and the plaintiff was able to prove infringement. It's not alleged, it's legally proven fact.
Not necessarily. It is appropriate to use allegedly so long as the judgment is not final. The judgment will not become final until Microsoft has exhausted or waived its right to appeal the jury's decision before higher courts such as the Federal Circuit and possibly the Supreme Court. If a higher court reverses the verdict, then "definitively" just became... bizarro world definitively.
Since Microsoft is already acting, you are probably correct, but for a somewhat different reason than the one you announced.
Umm... you are going to have a problem there. A majority of patent lawyers were at the very least educated as engineers. We're the ones that can make the weaponry, and sue you to obtain all of yours through little pieces of paper that are backed by the weaponry wielded by the police.
Also, lawyers don't necessarily like it. Especially when you look at transactional and commercial law, where everyone employs the lawyers to reduce the likelihood of everyone else screwing them over. You're not an innocent populace... even the engineers.
There's a geologist in my department who developed a technique for measuring earth density. This could be good for looking for oil or other valuables underground. He published his work, like all scientists. So some mining/prospecting company read up on it, patented a related method and then tried to stop him from doing any more research on it, lest he give away 'their' secrets to their competitors.
Assuming that the facts are exactly as you've claimed then to be, then:
1. Your geologist should order a copy of the file history for the patent from the USPTO.
2. Your geologist should look to see whether his publication was cited by the mining/prospecting company during the prosecution of the patent.
2a. If your geologist can prove that the patent was derived from his work and that the applicant did not disclose his work to the patent office, then he has at least a couple of defenses should the company ever accuse him of patent infringement. This way lies potential litigation, however the potential damages are limited to a reasonable royalty on the geologist's activities (possibly enhanced for willful infringement), which considering that he's an academic is unlikely to amount to something worth litigation. He would have to discuss this with a patent attorney once he's gathered the necessary information. I'm telling you how he can find out what to do, not what to do.
3. If your geologist discovers that his work was not cited in the patent application, then he can file a request for ex parte reexamination (35 U.S.C. 302) for $2520 and the cost of writing a persuasive letter. In this case, discussing the letter with a patent attorney would be wise but not strictly necessary. Yes, the fees can be galling, but I've paid comparable fees just to obtain licensing, and have annual fees that approach $1000 just to practice, so it's not as if he's being uniquely abused. Unfortunately, clearing legal obstacles is sometimes a cost of doing business.
I got about 20% of the way through and lost interest in this even though I've seriously been wondering what this whole Blackberry lawsuit is about. How can someone have a patent on something like "wireless e-mail"?
I'm reasonably certain that the claims in the NTP patents do not read "1. A system for sending and receiving wireless e-mail comprising: wireless e-mail." You need to read the patents before you attempt to discuss the issue.
Tons of phones can read e-mail and even my Motorola pager can send and receive e-mail.
From the article, which discusses NTP's "predecessor":
AT&T had an e-mail system and a prototype computer; what it lacked was a paging service that could put the two together. But after a year of flirting with Telefind, even demonstrating Telefind's system at the Comdex computer show in Las Vegas, AT&T opted for a larger partner in Skytel. With no partner and scant resources, Telefind folded at the end of 1991.
Phones and pagers did not do e-mail back in 1991. There might have been developmental systems that combined two way paging and e-mail at that time, but there might not have been. That is the purpose of the reexamination proceedings.
If NTP sat on this submarine patent just waiting for people to start using their technology without sending out cease and desist orders then their patent should be invalidated.
Published patents are not "submarine patents". Submarine patents are patents that issue after a technology becomes popularized because prosecution was unreasonably delayed in the patent office. Furthermore, you're ignoring this small piece of history, which was within the first 20% of the article:
By 2001, the company was in a headlong rush to make its BlackBerry a must-have accessory for the executive on the go, even giving away thousands free, including to members of the U.S. Congress.
More than a year earlier, Mr. Campana and Mr. Stout had sent what amounted to a form letter, warning several companies -- RIM among them -- that they were infringing on wireless e-mail patents. The letter politely invited recipients to negotiate licensing rights with NTP Inc.
Personally I feel companies that buy and sell patents as if they're some kind of property are a disgrace to everything the patent and trademark system was founded to uphold. They're not using the patents to innovate, they're just using the patents to extort money out of other companies.
Patents are property, and patents are not designed to encourage patent owners to innovate. Patents are designed to encourage inventors to disclose their technology to the public practically as soon as that technology is developed. The patent is the reward for the disclosure, which permits others to improve on the technology without having to reverse engineer it, and the safety net for the inventor, which permits him to develop and market the invention or partner with others to develop and market the invention. Telefind attempted to develop and market the invention and failed. NTP offered to partner with RIM well before the Blackberry become popular in the U.S., and RIM refused. Do you know for a fact that there were other viable partners before RIM? Can you create a rational standard for how much effort an inventor/patent owner must put into developing an invention or marketing the invention to others before they are not a disgrace to everything the patent system stands for?
NTP should have all its patents stripped because it's quite clear they're nothing but a patent squatter.
That's dangerous talk. How do you feel about the Supreme Court's ruling on eminent domain? What if the local government wanted to condemn your home so that Wal-Mart could build another Super Center? After all, you should have your deed stripped because it's quite clear that you're nothing but a land squatter. You should live in a 1400 sq ft apartment that makes efficient use of land and
One must always question - is it really worth the effort to file a patent. If the patent is refused - is the filing still valid as "prior art" and therefore sufficient to be able to avoid others to claim a patent and then kick you out of the market?
The majority of patents are not worth the cost of preparing and filing the application. The minority of patents are worth modest fortunes, and sometimes more. The problem is determining the difference between the former and the latter. It's educated guesswork.
Patent applications do not necessarily become prior art. Before November of 2000, U.S. patent applications were not published as a matter of course. The content of a patent application only became public if a later patent or a printed publication made the public aware of the abandoned application's existence. If the document is not accessible to the interested public, it is not prior art. Even after November of 2000, a U.S. patent application can be withheld from publication if the inventor certifies that they have not and will not file an application in any patent office that has an 18 month publication rule (the current standard).
That being said, if you want to prevent others from patenting your idea, whether or not you intend to patent it, all you have to do is publish the idea in a way that's accessible to the public. This is phenomenally easy to do when you consider the existence of Google and the internet. Make sure that the document can be indexed by search engines, and include a precise publication date (not "2004"), and you've overcome most of the barriers that would prevent an examiner or attorney from using your publication as prior art against an application or patent.
Of course, if you intend to patent an invention described in that document, especially in countries outside the U.S., you would be well advised to publish your idea only after you've filed the application(s)...
And still Mr. Lazaridis and RIM didn't settle. Friends and colleagues say Mr. Lazaridis is uncompromising by nature. "Mike is the kind of guy who doesn't make business compromises. You know how people plead guilty, even when they know they're innocent, just to get a reduced sentence -- Mike wouldn't do that," says Bill Frezza, who worked with RIM on prototype wireless devices in the early 1990s while he worked at Ericsson Canada Ltd.
Yes, it's the lawyers' fault. The businessmen that 1. want to receive a royalty for their patented IP and 2. don't want to pay anything for others' patented IP are the victims. If only there weren't lawyers, these businessmen would... fight it out in court anyway (recall, RIM sought patents and threatened others in the industry with patent infringement suits as well).
Almost nobody likes other people's lawyers, but a relatively high percentage of of people like their own lawyers. Perhaps you need to look deeper at who is at fault in each individual situation.
It most certainly does. Modification of a copyrighted work produces a derivative work, and is a presumptive infringement of the owner's rights under 17 U.S.C. sec. 102.
17 USC Sec. 103 - Subject matter of copyright: Compilations and derivative works
(a) The subject matter of copyright as specified by section 102 includes compilations and derivative works, but protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully.
This is because they are required to list what intellectual property the company owns to shareholders and if it is later found out that the company doesn't really own it, because it is based on a GPL'd software, then is that a Sarbanes-Oxley violation.
Wrong.
A corporation is required to account for intangible assets that the company owns, and timely and accurately report the acquisition cost, book value, and sale value, if any, in aggregate as part of its normal financial reporting. Refer to SOx sec 302 and FASB statements 141 and 142. SOx requires that existing financial reports be more accurate, not more detailed, in general. Those assets will be reported in categories, as part of particular transactions, or both, but not item by item in most corporate financial reports. IBM does not list the value of the individual patents held in its portfolio in its reports to investors, and I can fairly confidently say that it never will. GPL software is no different in that respect.
GPL software is different in that it should not even be an issue in most cases because it has no intrinsic acquisition cost, no book value, and no sale value. If a corporation pays for GPL software, they are almost certainly paying for a SERVICE supporting the GPL software, which is an expense, not an asset. Remember all those "You really can make money off GPL software" discussions that have cropped up on Slashdot over the years? This point alone makes the SOx argument almost laughable.
The issue is not whether a company has violated the GPL, but whether a corporation knows that is has violated the GPL and failed to account for the potential liability, artificially inflating the value of the corporation. This information is not necessarily even going to be public, as it can be lumped into a litigation reserve along with every other potential liability associated with identified assets. Assuming that there is no pending or probable litigation, you are not going to find a corporate report that identifies the separate 'potential liability' associated with, say, products liability suits over Tickle-Me-Elmo dolls as well. It's the same reporting detail issue described above.
Remember, SOx is about accuracy and certification -- it's requires that corporations display an accurate external appearance, not provide a CAT-scan like view of the entire workings of the business. You are not gaining additional transparency, you are supposedly gaining assurance that the corporation is not lying about the gross and net numbers under the existing reporting style. If there's no accounting irregularity, the software compliance issue is almost meaningless to SOx (although still important to operations).
One question I ask myself is if I can copyright my personal data. And when I see the information being misused, can I then sue for copyright infringement?
That's a good question, since I haven't seen cases where individuals offered to sell their own personal data "packet". You need to ask yourself whether your personal data is expressive content, or merely a collection of facts. If you lean toward the latter, you need to ask yourself whether the way in which you select or present the facts is expressive, or merely a catch all collection of everything excluding your infrequent visits to sites that teach the beauty of the human form to budding artists. If you lean toward the latter again, it's relatively clear that you're out of luck. If you lean toward the former, you can only sue if someone makes an almost exact copy of your personal data, rather than mining the underlying facts into their own database.
You're asking a question that is dangerously similar to the baseball statistics claim that was posted on the front page ~3 days ago. If you thought that baseball statistics were a free for all, then why shouldn't your personal data be a free for all by those not covered by existing statutory obligations against data marketing?
Fortunately, you have something that the MLB/baseball players do not -- some degree of privacy that shields information that marketers might value. Baseball stats are inarguably public, whether they are property or not. Your personal data is a hybrid, with a lot depending on who you tell what details to and under what conditions.
You do not need copyright to protect your personal data -- and it can't really do so unless you're the one assembling the personal data. Instead, you can use contract law to protect your personal data. Sell the data under the terms of the contract, require resale of the data under similar terms (or, by an organization that sells the data under terms that you can accept), and sue for breach of contract, rather than copyright infringement.
The business model is probably a pipe dream because unless the data is unique, there are less expensive ways to collect data either in aggregate or as a demographic slice. Nevertheless, you could in theory protect your own personal data. In practice, and what you may really be after in view of your interest in copyright, you need to contact your legislators and demand better statutory personal data protections (such as, although I am not endorsing them, the European Directives).
Slashdot Mirror
I must have missed the day where the contracts professor taught that a contract ment one thing for a "good" customer and another thing for a "bad" customer even though both customers were honoring the terms of the contract.
Netflix advertises: cite
So long as they continue to advertise these terms and act upon other terms, whether it's in the contract or not, they are subject to suits for false advertising and unfair competition. The existing class action suit (which has not been tried or settled yet) only affects people who were Netflix customers on or before Jan 15, 2005. If you don't like the way that Netflix is conducting business, and you're not covered by the existing class, feel free to sue them again.
The GPL 3 is anti-DRM in a big way, and Linus doesn't agree with that, fair enough. However another aspect of it is to prevent someone from taking GPL code, and designing a hardware/software combo that will only run using unmodified versions of the code. In such an instance, they use GPL code, but their modifications are useless to the rest of the world because we can't modify their version and run it on the device. Basically they break Linus' "quid pro quo" rule. Thus part of what GPL 3 is trying to do is exactly what Linus says he believes in.
Their modifications are not useless to the world. Their modifications are disclosed to the world, which means that the world can construct an identical hardware device that will run unsigned code and use the disclosed code, or the world can adapt the disclosed code to run on similar hardware devices that will run unsigned code.
GPL2 requires you to share the software with others. GPL3 would require you to share the hardware with others. This is a significant change to the ethic that you've labeled as the "quid pro quo" rule. Even if you disagree that it is a change, I don't believe that you can accurately contend that Linus has announced that he believes in the shared hardware ethic, nor that Linus even secretly believes in the shared hardware ethic. Linus spent a significant portion of his career working at a company that sold an essentially closed hardware platform (Transmeta CPUs), which suggests that he doesn't hew to quite the same muse as RMS.
First, while you are in patent pending, you are protected.
You are only protected after your application is published, and only if you have not substantially altered the scope of the claims while you're before the USPTO. A published claim must have substantially the same scope as an issued claim, or there is no practical protection. This not necessarily an easy task when there is extensive prior art. If you file an application blindly (also relevant to your second point below), it is practically impossible.
Second, Patents are not expensive, paten lawyers are. You can file a patent as an individual for a few hundred dollars.
The filing fee is $395 for an individual, assuming that you qualify as a small entity. The filing fee cannot get you a patent. If you prosecute the application perfectly, meaning everything you need is in the specification (no affidavits or declarations), you argue allowable claims within two office actions (not an easy task, it is not uncommon for an examiner to be wrong, and they do not tend to "roll over" as some suggest), and you ask for no extensions of time to make your arguments, the typical patent itself will cost you an additional $1000 (issue fee and publication fee).
If you file an application without performing a patentability search and analysis, you are almost guaranteed to obtain an inferior patent (no pre-grant protection, claims that can only be interpreted literally) or no patent at all. A search costs ~$500 in a simple case. The time spent analyzing the results will at least equal that, unless your opportunity cost for your time is $0.
Patent lawyers are expensive because patent law is hard. The USPTO offers free copies of past patent bar examinations with answers here. You need to score 70% or better to pass, i.e. be minimally competent, and you need to complete the examination in 6 hours or less. Good luck.
Third, a patent is a way of saying you had it first, but there are other ways.
True. But most people seeking patents claim that they are not only seeking notoriety. Patent grants rights. Publishing your paper on the internet grants others the ability to copy you mercilessly. People who come up with truly novel and non-obvious inventions typically prefer to obtain rights.
Forth, This would be even more abused then the current system
I don't have an opinion on this, at least not yet. Many European countries have had petit patent systems for historically significant periods of time. Literature discussing the experiences in those countries would be a good place to being if you want to form an informed opinion.
I just know that someone is going to slam me for using "final judgment" in a lay sense, probably for using "final judgment" incorrectly in the legal sense. The decision of the trial court after a verdict, motions, and all the rest is legally called a "final judgment". However, an appeal could result in an order that changes or could change the final judgment before it can be fully applied to the parties in the case. Strictly speaking, that's called enforcement and satisfaction. We all learned this in law school. Slashdot posters generally haven't, and are probably getting the same glassy stare that most would get if I began reciting the Old Testament in Aramaic. 'Nuf said.
Allegedly? No...not allegedly, definitively. It went to court, and the plaintiff was able to prove infringement. It's not alleged, it's legally proven fact.
Not necessarily. It is appropriate to use allegedly so long as the judgment is not final. The judgment will not become final until Microsoft has exhausted or waived its right to appeal the jury's decision before higher courts such as the Federal Circuit and possibly the Supreme Court. If a higher court reverses the verdict, then "definitively" just became... bizarro world definitively.
Since Microsoft is already acting, you are probably correct, but for a somewhat different reason than the one you announced.
Umm... you are going to have a problem there. A majority of patent lawyers were at the very least educated as engineers. We're the ones that can make the weaponry, and sue you to obtain all of yours through little pieces of paper that are backed by the weaponry wielded by the police.
Also, lawyers don't necessarily like it. Especially when you look at transactional and commercial law, where everyone employs the lawyers to reduce the likelihood of everyone else screwing them over. You're not an innocent populace... even the engineers.
There's a geologist in my department who developed a technique for measuring earth density. This could be good for looking for oil or other valuables underground. He published his work, like all scientists. So some mining/prospecting company read up on it, patented a related method and then tried to stop him from doing any more research on it, lest he give away 'their' secrets to their competitors.
Assuming that the facts are exactly as you've claimed then to be, then:
1. Your geologist should order a copy of the file history for the patent from the USPTO.
2. Your geologist should look to see whether his publication was cited by the mining/prospecting company during the prosecution of the patent.
2a. If your geologist can prove that the patent was derived from his work and that the applicant did not disclose his work to the patent office, then he has at least a couple of defenses should the company ever accuse him of patent infringement. This way lies potential litigation, however the potential damages are limited to a reasonable royalty on the geologist's activities (possibly enhanced for willful infringement), which considering that he's an academic is unlikely to amount to something worth litigation. He would have to discuss this with a patent attorney once he's gathered the necessary information. I'm telling you how he can find out what to do, not what to do.
3. If your geologist discovers that his work was not cited in the patent application, then he can file a request for ex parte reexamination (35 U.S.C. 302) for $2520 and the cost of writing a persuasive letter. In this case, discussing the letter with a patent attorney would be wise but not strictly necessary. Yes, the fees can be galling, but I've paid comparable fees just to obtain licensing, and have annual fees that approach $1000 just to practice, so it's not as if he's being uniquely abused. Unfortunately, clearing legal obstacles is sometimes a cost of doing business.
I got about 20% of the way through and lost interest in this even though I've seriously been wondering what this whole Blackberry lawsuit is about. How can someone have a patent on something like "wireless e-mail"?
I'm reasonably certain that the claims in the NTP patents do not read "1. A system for sending and receiving wireless e-mail comprising: wireless e-mail." You need to read the patents before you attempt to discuss the issue.
Tons of phones can read e-mail and even my Motorola pager can send and receive e-mail.
From the article, which discusses NTP's "predecessor": AT&T had an e-mail system and a prototype computer; what it lacked was a paging service that could put the two together. But after a year of flirting with Telefind, even demonstrating Telefind's system at the Comdex computer show in Las Vegas, AT&T opted for a larger partner in Skytel. With no partner and scant resources, Telefind folded at the end of 1991.
Phones and pagers did not do e-mail back in 1991. There might have been developmental systems that combined two way paging and e-mail at that time, but there might not have been. That is the purpose of the reexamination proceedings.
If NTP sat on this submarine patent just waiting for people to start using their technology without sending out cease and desist orders then their patent should be invalidated.
Published patents are not "submarine patents". Submarine patents are patents that issue after a technology becomes popularized because prosecution was unreasonably delayed in the patent office. Furthermore, you're ignoring this small piece of history, which was within the first 20% of the article:
By 2001, the company was in a headlong rush to make its BlackBerry a must-have accessory for the executive on the go, even giving away thousands free, including to members of the U.S. Congress.
More than a year earlier, Mr. Campana and Mr. Stout had sent what amounted to a form letter, warning several companies -- RIM among them -- that they were infringing on wireless e-mail patents. The letter politely invited recipients to negotiate licensing rights with NTP Inc.
Personally I feel companies that buy and sell patents as if they're some kind of property are a disgrace to everything the patent and trademark system was founded to uphold. They're not using the patents to innovate, they're just using the patents to extort money out of other companies.
Patents are property, and patents are not designed to encourage patent owners to innovate. Patents are designed to encourage inventors to disclose their technology to the public practically as soon as that technology is developed. The patent is the reward for the disclosure, which permits others to improve on the technology without having to reverse engineer it, and the safety net for the inventor, which permits him to develop and market the invention or partner with others to develop and market the invention. Telefind attempted to develop and market the invention and failed. NTP offered to partner with RIM well before the Blackberry become popular in the U.S., and RIM refused. Do you know for a fact that there were other viable partners before RIM? Can you create a rational standard for how much effort an inventor/patent owner must put into developing an invention or marketing the invention to others before they are not a disgrace to everything the patent system stands for?
NTP should have all its patents stripped because it's quite clear they're nothing but a patent squatter.
That's dangerous talk. How do you feel about the Supreme Court's ruling on eminent domain? What if the local government wanted to condemn your home so that Wal-Mart could build another Super Center? After all, you should have your deed stripped because it's quite clear that you're nothing but a land squatter. You should live in a 1400 sq ft apartment that makes efficient use of land and
One must always question - is it really worth the effort to file a patent. If the patent is refused - is the filing still valid as "prior art" and therefore sufficient to be able to avoid others to claim a patent and then kick you out of the market?
The majority of patents are not worth the cost of preparing and filing the application. The minority of patents are worth modest fortunes, and sometimes more. The problem is determining the difference between the former and the latter. It's educated guesswork.
Patent applications do not necessarily become prior art. Before November of 2000, U.S. patent applications were not published as a matter of course. The content of a patent application only became public if a later patent or a printed publication made the public aware of the abandoned application's existence. If the document is not accessible to the interested public, it is not prior art. Even after November of 2000, a U.S. patent application can be withheld from publication if the inventor certifies that they have not and will not file an application in any patent office that has an 18 month publication rule (the current standard).
That being said, if you want to prevent others from patenting your idea, whether or not you intend to patent it, all you have to do is publish the idea in a way that's accessible to the public. This is phenomenally easy to do when you consider the existence of Google and the internet. Make sure that the document can be indexed by search engines, and include a precise publication date (not "2004"), and you've overcome most of the barriers that would prevent an examiner or attorney from using your publication as prior art against an application or patent.
Of course, if you intend to patent an invention described in that document, especially in countries outside the U.S., you would be well advised to publish your idea only after you've filed the application(s)...
And still Mr. Lazaridis and RIM didn't settle. Friends and colleagues say Mr. Lazaridis is uncompromising by nature. "Mike is the kind of guy who doesn't make business compromises. You know how people plead guilty, even when they know they're innocent, just to get a reduced sentence -- Mike wouldn't do that," says Bill Frezza, who worked with RIM on prototype wireless devices in the early 1990s while he worked at Ericsson Canada Ltd. Yes, it's the lawyers' fault. The businessmen that 1. want to receive a royalty for their patented IP and 2. don't want to pay anything for others' patented IP are the victims. If only there weren't lawyers, these businessmen would... fight it out in court anyway (recall, RIM sought patents and threatened others in the industry with patent infringement suits as well). Almost nobody likes other people's lawyers, but a relatively high percentage of of people like their own lawyers. Perhaps you need to look deeper at who is at fault in each individual situation.
17 USC Sec. 106(2). Please review the entire reply chain under your post.
It most certainly does. Modification of a copyrighted work produces a derivative work, and is a presumptive infringement of the owner's rights under 17 U.S.C. sec. 102.
This is because they are required to list what intellectual property the company owns to shareholders and if it is later found out that the company doesn't really own it, because it is based on a GPL'd software, then is that a Sarbanes-Oxley violation.
Wrong.
A corporation is required to account for intangible assets that the company owns, and timely and accurately report the acquisition cost, book value, and sale value, if any, in aggregate as part of its normal financial reporting. Refer to SOx sec 302 and FASB statements 141 and 142. SOx requires that existing financial reports be more accurate, not more detailed, in general. Those assets will be reported in categories, as part of particular transactions, or both, but not item by item in most corporate financial reports. IBM does not list the value of the individual patents held in its portfolio in its reports to investors, and I can fairly confidently say that it never will. GPL software is no different in that respect.
GPL software is different in that it should not even be an issue in most cases because it has no intrinsic acquisition cost, no book value, and no sale value. If a corporation pays for GPL software, they are almost certainly paying for a SERVICE supporting the GPL software, which is an expense, not an asset. Remember all those "You really can make money off GPL software" discussions that have cropped up on Slashdot over the years? This point alone makes the SOx argument almost laughable.
The issue is not whether a company has violated the GPL, but whether a corporation knows that is has violated the GPL and failed to account for the potential liability, artificially inflating the value of the corporation. This information is not necessarily even going to be public, as it can be lumped into a litigation reserve along with every other potential liability associated with identified assets. Assuming that there is no pending or probable litigation, you are not going to find a corporate report that identifies the separate 'potential liability' associated with, say, products liability suits over Tickle-Me-Elmo dolls as well. It's the same reporting detail issue described above.
Remember, SOx is about accuracy and certification -- it's requires that corporations display an accurate external appearance, not provide a CAT-scan like view of the entire workings of the business. You are not gaining additional transparency, you are supposedly gaining assurance that the corporation is not lying about the gross and net numbers under the existing reporting style. If there's no accounting irregularity, the software compliance issue is almost meaningless to SOx (although still important to operations).
One question I ask myself is if I can copyright my personal data. And when I see the information being misused, can I then sue for copyright infringement?
That's a good question, since I haven't seen cases where individuals offered to sell their own personal data "packet". You need to ask yourself whether your personal data is expressive content, or merely a collection of facts. If you lean toward the latter, you need to ask yourself whether the way in which you select or present the facts is expressive, or merely a catch all collection of everything excluding your infrequent visits to sites that teach the beauty of the human form to budding artists. If you lean toward the latter again, it's relatively clear that you're out of luck. If you lean toward the former, you can only sue if someone makes an almost exact copy of your personal data, rather than mining the underlying facts into their own database.
You're asking a question that is dangerously similar to the baseball statistics claim that was posted on the front page ~3 days ago. If you thought that baseball statistics were a free for all, then why shouldn't your personal data be a free for all by those not covered by existing statutory obligations against data marketing?
Fortunately, you have something that the MLB/baseball players do not -- some degree of privacy that shields information that marketers might value. Baseball stats are inarguably public, whether they are property or not. Your personal data is a hybrid, with a lot depending on who you tell what details to and under what conditions.
You do not need copyright to protect your personal data -- and it can't really do so unless you're the one assembling the personal data. Instead, you can use contract law to protect your personal data. Sell the data under the terms of the contract, require resale of the data under similar terms (or, by an organization that sells the data under terms that you can accept), and sue for breach of contract, rather than copyright infringement.
The business model is probably a pipe dream because unless the data is unique, there are less expensive ways to collect data either in aggregate or as a demographic slice. Nevertheless, you could in theory protect your own personal data. In practice, and what you may really be after in view of your interest in copyright, you need to contact your legislators and demand better statutory personal data protections (such as, although I am not endorsing them, the European Directives).