Not that I agree with this, but I believe that a patent is considered property for the purposes of the 5th Amendments "Just Compensation" clause. Given that, patent holders may be able to sue the Government for "taking" the patent back.
Since the argument that the subject matter at issue is unpatentable is that the patent right was never authorized by the law in the first place, there can't be an unconstitutional taking since there was never any legal property right.
But if there were not patents, no patent attorneys would get paid.
Which would be relevant if the issue here was the elimination of patents entirely, which it is not. The change at issue here might (or might not) clearly and unambiguously eliminate most software and business process patents, but it would also create a whole new "edge case" of patents and activity and litigation aroudn that edge that would feed patent attorneys.
I never argued it's a power grab. But for the PTO to argue in court that the criteria they themselves have used for decades is wrong is obscene and patently (ahem) unfair.
They are arguing that as an application of, among other things, new rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court, that have expressly ruled that what the PTO has done things in the past (and the way the Federal Circuit has applied the law that has guided the PTO previously) is, in some cases, incorrect.
As I argued in other postings, businesses deserve better than that.
Our Constitutional order of government reflect the primacy of the interests of business that you seem to be suggesting here in the interpretation of the law. While I suppose some people may see this as a flaw, I think business has enough of a sway over the writing of the law, the election of officers, and the appointment of judges that they don't need any more priority than they already have.
How many contracts out there involve the selling and licensing of software patents? Every one of these contracts could now be in dispute, as the very premise of these contract disappears. The legal morass would be massive.
Again, I think you lack perspective. While this is a big deal for people who care about software patents, its not (in terms of its effect on premises of existing contracts) all that unusual among major issues of legal interpretation. Issues like this come up periodically, and its part of the routine workload of the courts. And it happens enough that the effect of legal impossibility on contract obligations is not some big mystery that needs to get worked out from scratch every time.
That blog seems to want software patents to continue -- not surprising, really, given that it's a "patent law blog", and lawyers are the ones with the most to win from the cottage industry of software patents.
Lawyers have interests on both sides (and have clients with interests on both sides), and a "patent law blog" could have interests on both sides. But, the author of the particular blog entry that is TFA here is a lawyer hired to write an amicus brief depending software patents in the particular case at issue here, so you are correct to infer that there is a self-interest motive here, though it is more specific than the one you inferred.
The first thing IBM, Google, Microsoft, and a gaggle of companies will do is march right over to congress and say that the earth will implode if this is allowed.
Maybe, maybe not; some big software companies may love software patents, some may hate the expense they have to go through to patent things defensively. While TFA paints Google is threatened by this, the presentation is somewhat slanted. A different perspective is here.
If this is actually true and at least the frivolous software patents are going to be removed, what about those who have been sued by the patent owners and lost? Will they be entitled to receive anything back from the patent owners as the patents are now invalidated?
No, court decisions don't create precedent that applies to cases that have a final resolution in the past, so a ruling that a broad class of subject matter was unpatentable wouldn't allow those who had lost patent suits based on such matter to sue to undue the prior judgements. OTOH, it would apply to cases still on appeal, and might allow overturning of ongoing effects of prior litigation (such as permanent injunctions). But money that was awarded and paid is gone.
I couldn't find a particular date when any of this might be implemented, so it's still up in the air.
Its a legal controversy in the courts; if the class of patents at issue are ruled, by the Supreme Court (or by the Federal Circuit with the Supreme's taking a pass) to cover matter which is unpatentable, then the new rule will be applied in all patent controversies before US courts until and unless that rule itself is overturned by the courts, or Congress changes the statute law on which the decision is based. This isn't an administrative regulation with a proposed effective date, but a controversy about the meaning of existing law.
The article uses the workd "invalidate", which sounds to me like it would cancel existing patents. My question is - would this new set of criteria be retroactive, or would it apply only to new applications?
Changes to the scope of matters to which patent protection applies would affect existing patents, since those patents would no longer relate to patentable subject matter and thus could not be enforced in court.
The PTO changing the rules to cancel previously approved patents would generate massive legal problems.
The PTO is not changing the rules, the PTO is arguing to the courts that the law has been incorrectly applied (including by the PTO) in the past, and that the law should be correctly applied now and in the future. Since patent rights are not inherent rights, but privileges granted by law, there is no basis for protecting them other than the laws passed by Congress authorizing and limiting them. If those laws are incorrectly applied to restrict freedoms of others in ways that the law does not authorize, it is a violation of the Constitutional rights of every person affected (specifically, its a deprivation of liberty without [procedural] due process).
In particular, companies have spent billions of dollars to register patents, only for the PTO to say "Oops, just kidding. Jokes on you."
If the PTO is correct, those companies spent billions of dollars to exploit a misapplication of the law to which from which they were not entitled to benefit but did, in fact, benefit. Since they will neither be recompensed for the expenditures nor forced to disgorge their already-realized ill-gotten gains, I don't see the particular problem here.
This seems to be a fairly routine controversy over what the law means and how it should be applied vs. how it has been applied, not some kind of unusual power grab that you are characterizing it as.
Why can't there be a cloud that behaves like a single computer with infinite CPU, infinite RAM and infinite storage?
There could (conceivably) be a cloud that behaved something like a single computer with an the total number of cores available in the cloud, the total RAM of cloud, and the total storage of the cloud (all minus necessary operating overhead), but that won't change the fact that, no matter how you slice it, N cores at speed Y don't run software identically to one core at speed N*Y, so you still have to design your software to scale to take advantage of multiple cores. There's lots of ways of doing this, and the setup of the system itself can help a bit (particularly if it is narrowly tuned to to particular kinds of applications, or provides already scalable software tools for some tasks -- as Google and Amazon do for data storage.)
I suppose there may be a time when you can just draw up something like a BPMN diagram, upload the serialization of it to the cloud, and instantly get a scalable system implementing the process you've designed, but I don't see it happening all that soon.
Part of gaining neutral information about a subject is through logic and reasoning, discourse and all those other forgotten arts.
Which Knol allows. While portrayed here as an "expert Wiki", its really not "expert" and, while in some sense Wiki-like, isn't much Wikipedia-like. Anyone can write a knol, on any topic, there is no "expertise" requirement.
The other thing I think will become a problem is when Expert A writes an article on Subject X, then Expert B says, hey, Subject X is missing information Z, and Export A says no way, and Expert B can't write Subject X, but will write Subject AlmostX
Why can't Expert B write Subject X? There is explicitly no prohibition on topic duplication, and no (that I can find) prohibition on title duplication.
In wikipedia, the two articles would be merged. Knol is gonna have a big synthesis problem.
Knol is not a work. Knol is place for people to put works (and to collaborate on them if they chose). Wikipedia is a collaborative work.
I've only really looked at this article, which was the most prominently featured on their front page. Reading the first few paragraphs it comes across as one persons view and experiences as opposed to an encyclopaedia. Some work will need to be done on this if it is to be a serious challenger to Wikipedia.
Its not really a direct challenger to Wikipedia, its a pretty different concept but Wikipedia is the most familiar thing to most readers that is somewhat similar, so they get portrayed as being head-to-head competitors. Its not at all aimed at being encyclopedic in the way Wikipedia is. Aside from the medical articles, the next biggest group seems to be "how-to" articles that would be out-of-scope for Wikipedia. Its also not a single, coherent, community-edited work with policies designed to promote consistent style and non-duplication.
Its more a "marketplace of articles", some of which may be collaborative, than an encyclopedia.
It's like Wikipedia but without the open collaboration which made Wikipedia successful.
Well, except that -- at the author's discretion -- "knols" can either use open, moderated, or closed collaboration, so its not "without open collaboration".
That being said, some translations will interpret passages, and slant the translation to fit in with a particular theological point of view (under the excuse of 'this is what the verse really means').
All translations are interpretations. Some have deliberate slant, some not.
For the Romans, Jesus was a John Doe. Just another non-citizen nutter who spoke against the Emperor and was nailed for it.
Not even that; he was (presuming the accuracy of the accounts we have in the Bible, which is the only record on which to judge) inconvenient to the local mucky-muck's whose cooperation made it practical for Rome to peacably administer the Empire, and was executed merely out of expediency, not because he spoke out against the Emperor or the Empire.
As far as Scripture goes, the Catholic Church currently uses the RSV-CE translation (Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition), which was released in 1951, using the best scholarship of the time.
The Catholic Church in the United States officially uses primarily the New American Bible, which is considerably newer (first produced in 1970, last complete update in 1991); the RSV-CE used to be permitted to be used in the Lectionary, but is no longer.
Is that statement really true? It contradicts my knowledge. One example I could think off was ths short novel "Little Lost Robot" where the first law is modified.
Apparently, we're both right; Asimov's portrayal of the laws is inconsistent -- they are at times (particularly in later works) portrayed as fundamental and inherent in the nature of the positronic brain, and at times (particularly in earlier works) portrayed as alterable, engineered safeguard's. Wikipedia gives a rationalization of this (without citation, perhaps OR) that, given that the earlier-later distinction follows both the history of when they were written and the place the stories have in the continuum, its arguable that the laws were original engineered but later so basic to the extraordinarily complex designs that you'd have to throw out centuries of the mathematics of positronic brain design and start over to build robots without them, so they were in effect set in stone. Given the historical inconsistencies in the series, though, I don't know that this rationalization is particularly necessary or convincing, but its out there.
Sure, I read another of the comments here describing what hardware and software it's running, and that's all cool and everything, but seriously: what is it good for other than it's value as a very expensive high-tech toy? Seriously, I may be missing an important point here, but I don't see where someone would want to pay so much money for what seems to amount to a very expensive hackers toy.
This is Slashdot. People who are will to pay so much money (or at least, wish they had the money free) for a "very expensive hackers toy" aren't really a rare commodity here.
Sure, the services allow you to pull CPU cycles from thin air whenever you need to, but they can't solve the deepest problems that make it hard for applications to scale gracefully, Wayner writes.
AFAICT, they aren't intended to. The deepest problems are software problems for which there is no general solution, only problem-specific solutions for each particular task; what they are intended to deal with is the hardware problem that having a scalable software solution is of limited value if you have a fixed pool of hardware and have to go through disruptive upgrades when you expand that pool of hardware (and deal with the associated capital costs.)
Cloud computing services are, largely, tools to help dynamically "right-size" hardware, changing it from a capital investment that requires predicting the future well to plan right to an operating costs that can be quickly adjusted based on changing needs. Complaining that they don't solve the fundamental problems of software scalability seems to be missing the point.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I have this strange feeling that we are slowly heading into Asimov's world. And all the problems (and benefits) that come along with it...
Since a core feature of that world is that certain behavioral constraints favorable (in general terms) to humanity were features of robotic brains, not because they were designed that way, but as a matter essentially of natural law (in Asimov's works, the laws of robotics were discovered, not designed), I somehow doubt that we are heading into anything much like Asimov's world.
The catholics used to use Latin before the dictionary which served two purposed. Latin was already a dead language which mean words and meaning couldn't be changed any more and served for locking meaning into the words.
Except that it wasn't a dead language as a result of the Church using it, and meaning did change (and often was opaque to start with) in Church Latin. Heck, there are still debates about exactly what certain terms mean in the Latin original of the current code of Canon Law.
The second purpose was that no matter where in the world you were, if you attended their church, you could understand and know the sermon.
The sermon (properly, the homily) in the Catholic Mass was the only part usually in the vernacular even when the service itself was in Latin. IIRC, the usual practice was (and remains, in those groups maintaining the Tridentine Mass) that the homily was in the vernacular when laity were present, but in Latin when only clergy and religious were present at the Mass.
From a religious point of view, if there is anything inspired, it would be the first version in its original language.
Why? Why wouldn't it be just as valid, from a "religious point of view", for a particular translation to be seen as inspired or, say, for the original writing of the various documents later assembled into the "Bible" and the assembly of the canon and many translations into many different languages at different times all to be seen as inspired? Is there something in the definition of "religious point of view" that mandates that inspiration happen once, and only with regard to the first reduction of an idea to writing?
The Fourteenth Amendment does not incorporate the Bill of Rights into the States' Constitutions.
It protects "life, liberty, and property" against arbitrary deprivation by the States. In my book -- and that of every Supreme Court to have addressed the issue -- most of the things in the Bill of Rights are pretty fundamental to "liberty" and thus included within the meaning of the word "liberty" in the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.
In fact, in 1866 the ratifiers of the Fourteenth understood the Amendment to cover "rights" such as citizenship, etc.
Certainly, the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment covers citizenship. Just as certainly, the Due Process Clause, Equal Protection Clause, Voting Rights Clause, and Privileges and Immunities clause, among others, of the 14th Amendment refer to things other than citizenship.
The word "rights" does not exist in the Fourteenth Amendment.
But the word "right" is in Section 2, and the word "liberty" is in the Due Process Clause of Section 1.
"Privileges and Immunities" does.
Actually, no, "privileges or immunities" does, despite the fact that the clause in which it appears is popularly labelled the "Privileges and Immunities" clause. If you are going to argue about which words and phrases are and are not used in the text of the Amendment, you should make sure you know which words and phrases are, in fact, used in the text of the Amendment.
They are exclusive terms.
No, they are terms with different meanings; the protection of "privileges or immunities" in one provision of an enactment does not exclude the protection of "rights" or "liberty" in some other provision of the same enactment. Note that incorporation is not a product of the "Privileges and Immunities" clause
Maybe it is you who should read your Constitution, friend. It is obvious you are confusing "rights" (inherent) and "privileges and immunities" as one and the same.
No, its still you that needs to read the 14th Amendment.
Re:Cloud computing does NOT take techs to understa
on
IT Jobs To Drop In 2009
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Quite the opposite, cloud computing takes marketing savvy and buzzword compliance to understand.
It's re-branded SOA, end of story
Cloud computing is not the same thing as Service Oriented Architecture in the same way that the interstate highway system isn't the same thing as an automobile.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the argument that the subject matter at issue is unpatentable is that the patent right was never authorized by the law in the first place, there can't be an unconstitutional taking since there was never any legal property right.
Which would be relevant if the issue here was the elimination of patents entirely, which it is not. The change at issue here might (or might not) clearly and unambiguously eliminate most software and business process patents, but it would also create a whole new "edge case" of patents and activity and litigation aroudn that edge that would feed patent attorneys.
They are arguing that as an application of, among other things, new rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court, that have expressly ruled that what the PTO has done things in the past (and the way the Federal Circuit has applied the law that has guided the PTO previously) is, in some cases, incorrect.
Our Constitutional order of government reflect the primacy of the interests of business that you seem to be suggesting here in the interpretation of the law. While I suppose some people may see this as a flaw, I think business has enough of a sway over the writing of the law, the election of officers, and the appointment of judges that they don't need any more priority than they already have.
Again, I think you lack perspective. While this is a big deal for people who care about software patents, its not (in terms of its effect on premises of existing contracts) all that unusual among major issues of legal interpretation. Issues like this come up periodically, and its part of the routine workload of the courts. And it happens enough that the effect of legal impossibility on contract obligations is not some big mystery that needs to get worked out from scratch every time.
Lawyers have interests on both sides (and have clients with interests on both sides), and a "patent law blog" could have interests on both sides. But, the author of the particular blog entry that is TFA here is a lawyer hired to write an amicus brief depending software patents in the particular case at issue here, so you are correct to infer that there is a self-interest motive here, though it is more specific than the one you inferred.
Maybe, maybe not; some big software companies may love software patents, some may hate the expense they have to go through to patent things defensively. While TFA paints Google is threatened by this, the presentation is somewhat slanted. A different perspective is here.
No, court decisions don't create precedent that applies to cases that have a final resolution in the past, so a ruling that a broad class of subject matter was unpatentable wouldn't allow those who had lost patent suits based on such matter to sue to undue the prior judgements. OTOH, it would apply to cases still on appeal, and might allow overturning of ongoing effects of prior litigation (such as permanent injunctions). But money that was awarded and paid is gone.
Its a legal controversy in the courts; if the class of patents at issue are ruled, by the Supreme Court (or by the Federal Circuit with the Supreme's taking a pass) to cover matter which is unpatentable, then the new rule will be applied in all patent controversies before US courts until and unless that rule itself is overturned by the courts, or Congress changes the statute law on which the decision is based. This isn't an administrative regulation with a proposed effective date, but a controversy about the meaning of existing law.
Changes to the scope of matters to which patent protection applies would affect existing patents, since those patents would no longer relate to patentable subject matter and thus could not be enforced in court.
The PTO is not changing the rules, the PTO is arguing to the courts that the law has been incorrectly applied (including by the PTO) in the past, and that the law should be correctly applied now and in the future. Since patent rights are not inherent rights, but privileges granted by law, there is no basis for protecting them other than the laws passed by Congress authorizing and limiting them. If those laws are incorrectly applied to restrict freedoms of others in ways that the law does not authorize, it is a violation of the Constitutional rights of every person affected (specifically, its a deprivation of liberty without [procedural] due process).
If the PTO is correct, those companies spent billions of dollars to exploit a misapplication of the law to which from which they were not entitled to benefit but did, in fact, benefit. Since they will neither be recompensed for the expenditures nor forced to disgorge their already-realized ill-gotten gains, I don't see the particular problem here.
This seems to be a fairly routine controversy over what the law means and how it should be applied vs. how it has been applied, not some kind of unusual power grab that you are characterizing it as.
There could (conceivably) be a cloud that behaved something like a single computer with an the total number of cores available in the cloud, the total RAM of cloud, and the total storage of the cloud (all minus necessary operating overhead), but that won't change the fact that, no matter how you slice it, N cores at speed Y don't run software identically to one core at speed N*Y, so you still have to design your software to scale to take advantage of multiple cores. There's lots of ways of doing this, and the setup of the system itself can help a bit (particularly if it is narrowly tuned to to particular kinds of applications, or provides already scalable software tools for some tasks -- as Google and Amazon do for data storage.)
I suppose there may be a time when you can just draw up something like a BPMN diagram, upload the serialization of it to the cloud, and instantly get a scalable system implementing the process you've designed, but I don't see it happening all that soon.
Which Knol allows. While portrayed here as an "expert Wiki", its really not "expert" and, while in some sense Wiki-like, isn't much Wikipedia-like. Anyone can write a knol, on any topic, there is no "expertise" requirement.
Why can't Expert B write Subject X? There is explicitly no prohibition on topic duplication, and no (that I can find) prohibition on title duplication.
Knol is not a work. Knol is place for people to put works (and to collaborate on them if they chose). Wikipedia is a collaborative work.
Its not really a direct challenger to Wikipedia, its a pretty different concept but Wikipedia is the most familiar thing to most readers that is somewhat similar, so they get portrayed as being head-to-head competitors. Its not at all aimed at being encyclopedic in the way Wikipedia is. Aside from the medical articles, the next biggest group seems to be "how-to" articles that would be out-of-scope for Wikipedia. Its also not a single, coherent, community-edited work with policies designed to promote consistent style and non-duplication.
Its more a "marketplace of articles", some of which may be collaborative, than an encyclopedia.
Well, except that -- at the author's discretion -- "knols" can either use open, moderated, or closed collaboration, so its not "without open collaboration".
All translations are interpretations. Some have deliberate slant, some not.
Not even that; he was (presuming the accuracy of the accounts we have in the Bible, which is the only record on which to judge) inconvenient to the local mucky-muck's whose cooperation made it practical for Rome to peacably administer the Empire, and was executed merely out of expediency, not because he spoke out against the Emperor or the Empire.
The Catholic Church in the United States officially uses primarily the New American Bible, which is considerably newer (first produced in 1970, last complete update in 1991); the RSV-CE used to be permitted to be used in the Lectionary, but is no longer.
No, it wasn't.
It was the living language of the Roman Empire when it was first used by the Church, and it evolved pretty much continuously from that point
Apparently, we're both right; Asimov's portrayal of the laws is inconsistent -- they are at times (particularly in later works) portrayed as fundamental and inherent in the nature of the positronic brain, and at times (particularly in earlier works) portrayed as alterable, engineered safeguard's. Wikipedia gives a rationalization of this (without citation, perhaps OR) that, given that the earlier-later distinction follows both the history of when they were written and the place the stories have in the continuum, its arguable that the laws were original engineered but later so basic to the extraordinarily complex designs that you'd have to throw out centuries of the mathematics of positronic brain design and start over to build robots without them, so they were in effect set in stone. Given the historical inconsistencies in the series, though, I don't know that this rationalization is particularly necessary or convincing, but its out there.
This is Slashdot. People who are will to pay so much money (or at least, wish they had the money free) for a "very expensive hackers toy" aren't really a rare commodity here.
AFAICT, they aren't intended to. The deepest problems are software problems for which there is no general solution, only problem-specific solutions for each particular task; what they are intended to deal with is the hardware problem that having a scalable software solution is of limited value if you have a fixed pool of hardware and have to go through disruptive upgrades when you expand that pool of hardware (and deal with the associated capital costs.)
Cloud computing services are, largely, tools to help dynamically "right-size" hardware, changing it from a capital investment that requires predicting the future well to plan right to an operating costs that can be quickly adjusted based on changing needs. Complaining that they don't solve the fundamental problems of software scalability seems to be missing the point.
Since a core feature of that world is that certain behavioral constraints favorable (in general terms) to humanity were features of robotic brains, not because they were designed that way, but as a matter essentially of natural law (in Asimov's works, the laws of robotics were discovered, not designed), I somehow doubt that we are heading into anything much like Asimov's world.
Except that it wasn't a dead language as a result of the Church using it, and meaning did change (and often was opaque to start with) in Church Latin. Heck, there are still debates about exactly what certain terms mean in the Latin original of the current code of Canon Law.
The sermon (properly, the homily) in the Catholic Mass was the only part usually in the vernacular even when the service itself was in Latin. IIRC, the usual practice was (and remains, in those groups maintaining the Tridentine Mass) that the homily was in the vernacular when laity were present, but in Latin when only clergy and religious were present at the Mass.
Why? Why wouldn't it be just as valid, from a "religious point of view", for a particular translation to be seen as inspired or, say, for the original writing of the various documents later assembled into the "Bible" and the assembly of the canon and many translations into many different languages at different times all to be seen as inspired? Is there something in the definition of "religious point of view" that mandates that inspiration happen once, and only with regard to the first reduction of an idea to writing?
It protects "life, liberty, and property" against arbitrary deprivation by the States. In my book -- and that of every Supreme Court to have addressed the issue -- most of the things in the Bill of Rights are pretty fundamental to "liberty" and thus included within the meaning of the word "liberty" in the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Certainly, the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment covers citizenship. Just as certainly, the Due Process Clause, Equal Protection Clause, Voting Rights Clause, and Privileges and Immunities clause, among others, of the 14th Amendment refer to things other than citizenship.
But the word "right" is in Section 2, and the word "liberty" is in the Due Process Clause of Section 1.
Actually, no, "privileges or immunities" does, despite the fact that the clause in which it appears is popularly labelled the "Privileges and Immunities" clause. If you are going to argue about which words and phrases are and are not used in the text of the Amendment, you should make sure you know which words and phrases are, in fact, used in the text of the Amendment.
No, they are terms with different meanings; the protection of "privileges or immunities" in one provision of an enactment does not exclude the protection of "rights" or "liberty" in some other provision of the same enactment. Note that incorporation is not a product of the "Privileges and Immunities" clause
No, its still you that needs to read the 14th Amendment.
Cloud computing is not the same thing as Service Oriented Architecture in the same way that the interstate highway system isn't the same thing as an automobile.