Author Topic: The law is for YOUR protection. Honest! (Read 17026 times)

40hz · « **on:** June 24, 2011, 08:40 AM »

This today from the OSNews website:

"The House on Wednesday took up the most far-reaching overhaul of the patent system in 60 years, a bill that leaders in both parties said would make it easier for inventors to get their innovations to market and help put people back to work. The legislation, supported by the Obama administration and a broad range of business groups and high tech companies, aims to ease the lengthy backlog in patent applications, clean up some of the procedures that can lead to costly litigation and put the United States under the same filing system as the rest of the industrialized world." In other words, more protection for large companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft, and an increasing number of nonsense patents due to faster application procedures.

Link to article here.

Be careful what you ask for. Especially when you ask politicians for "reform." $:-\$

Renegade · « **Reply #1 on:** June 24, 2011, 09:42 AM »

The except was enough. I don't need to go getting myself all worked up...

Please insert copious amounts of screaming obscenities and profanities that would make the Devil blush...

zridling · « **Reply #2 on:** June 26, 2011, 04:23 AM »

What would happen if such legislation removed "money" from the patent equation? When Apple is racing to patent gestures -- GESTURES!! -- you might as well file a patent on the process of filing a patent. This vague legislation contains wording that seems to address the concerns of some, but which in practice gives MEGA-CORPORATIONS exactly what the want: the same old way. One step forward, two steps back: "We solved it, run along now!"

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #3 on:** June 26, 2011, 08:38 AM »

The law (in any country I know of including the UK and US) has NEVER been to protect people - otherwise it wouldn't be so biased towards the rich, businesses, governments, lawyers and royalty.

Did you know that a commoner (legal term applies to anyone who hasn't been ennobled - also known as arse licker or rich bastard) in the UK cannot sue the Royal family - even if the Royal Family were to commit blatantly obvious crimes (which they have done many times in the past) and that Royal prerogative extends to all sorts of areas of government. I am not sure but I assume that prerogative also applies in crown colonies (such as Australia and Canada). One example all the land STOLEN from the people cannot be returned to the people because now it belongs to "individuals" (also known as banks, estates etc.)

Hell in the UK children have to be taught about 'citizenship' in schools - it is now a compulsory subject - but NO ONE in the UK is a CITIZEN - we are all SUBJECTS of the crown (if you are from the UK and don't believe me look in your Passport). Citizenship classes in schools should consist of a one line statement on day one of school "there is no such thing as a UK citizen"! There done, now lets get on with speaking the Queen's English.

Any we live in a democracy ... since when? The UK is still a 'serfdom' - the US is just the country of 'I've got a bigger gun than you' even if that gone is now metaphorical (money).

Renegade · « **Reply #4 on:** June 26, 2011, 09:00 AM »

Thank you Carol. That sort of scratched my "rant-itch".

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #5 on:** June 26, 2011, 11:58 AM »

One of my pet rants - shame I can't drum any support for a UK takeover and real democracy ... here are the steps:

Disband the monarchy
Disband the House of Lords
Pass a law making political parties illegal
Pass a law that only people who have lived in a constituency for 5 years as their sole residence can stand to be elected
Have a general election based on local 'village sized' constituencies - the winners elect an "MP" for their district for parliament.
MPs elect cabinet members, cabinet members elect a PM from the cabinet
MPs and cabinet members have the right to remove any (including the PM) by a majority no confidence vote
Local district representatives have the right to remove their 'MP' by simple majority voting
Local people have the right to remove their local representative by simple majority vote

The advantage is that the local people would each know their constituency representative. Districts would be small enough so that the MP is known to all the local reps. and MPs would know all the potential cabinet members.

OK it wouldn't be perfect but it would be a genuinely representative government of the people based only on the performance and reputation of the politicians at each level and would remove patronage and business interests as the deciding factor at all levels.

The same would work in the US - just substitute Presidency for monarchy, Senate for the House of Lords, and President for Prime Minister.

Renegade · « **Reply #6 on:** June 26, 2011, 12:11 PM »

Carol, you're making some sense, so shut up before you get shot.

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #7 on:** June 26, 2011, 01:43 PM »

If I follow the usual course of action I should apply for ultimate power and then start raking in the lolly ... can't be arsed, rather have principles and be poor.

kyrathaba · « **Reply #8 on:** June 26, 2011, 02:10 PM »

+1 to everything you've said, Carol.

cranioscopical · « **Reply #9 on:** June 26, 2011, 04:08 PM »

rather have principles and be poor.
-Carol Haynes (June 26, 2011, 01:43 PM)

I'm proud to say that I have achieved the latter.

rjbull · « **Reply #10 on:** June 26, 2011, 04:13 PM »

This today from the OSNews website: [...]
In other words, more protection for large companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft,
-40hz (June 24, 2011, 08:40 AM)

I dunno. It's easy to rant. With apologies for not thinking this through very clearly:

I used to help with patent monitoring when I was at work, though in the ink/toner industry, not the software patents that have got everyone so excited. Some people seem to talk as if patents were deliberately created by government as a bureaucratic tool for big companies to stifle progress, especially if it's made by the small guy. It's more a case of big companies warily circling round each other. They quite naturally want commercial advantage and don't want their concepts making money for the competition too early. Don't forget that a patent is a contract between the assignee and the public, giving the assignee a monopoly on the use of the invention, subject to some conditions, for a limited period, after which the invention passes into the public domain and can be used by anyone without payment. In other words, the big companies are in fact revealing (within the parameters of the patenting game) what they're doing, and eventually their competitors will be able to use the invention for free. OK, not for a long time, but the principle is there.

The U.S. patent system has always had certain peculiarities, as compared with the rest of the world. It insists on "first to invent," rather than "first to file." Although that sounds like morally higher ground, it's in fact a lawyers' paradise. You can riffle through the European Patent Office's documentation and clearly establish who got there first - but it's going to be very hard indeed to assess the claims of two competing companies from lab notebooks or whatever, and very expensive too. Rightly or wrongly, the insistence on "first to invent" has always seemed to me to assume that almost all inventions, and certainly the game-changing ones, are made by individuals or duos working in a garage. Well, those do happen, but in my experience, very rarely indeed. The great majority of patents came from fairly large companies, were mostly made by teams, and assigned to the companies those teams worked for. The inventions might not even be particularly innovative, but they should have enough novelty to qualify, and sometimes gain their owners a owners a temporarly advantage. So perhaps patents are a big company game, but in the main the players are big companies.

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #11 on:** June 26, 2011, 04:31 PM »

It's easy to rant.
-rjbull (June 26, 2011, 04:13 PM)

Yes true

Some people seem to talk as if patents were deliberately created by government as a bureaucratic tool for big companies to stifle progress, especially if it's made by the small guy.

That is very true - but like most legal tools the people/companies with the big bucks can pervert and destroy the original concepts (laws, patents, trademarks) to their own ends. That seems to be the order of the day these days in software companies.

It's more a case of big companies warily circling round each other. They quite naturally want commercial advantage and don't want their concepts making money for the competition too early.

That is also true - but another truth is that they all claim to have invented things they never did - and usually the little people who did the hard work in the first place either get screwed or paid money to shut up.

Where is Xerox in all this? They invented the windowed interface - why aren't they suing Apple and Microsoft and Linux?

To me the perfect illustration of this distortion of legal intent is the companies trying to make trademarks out of normal everyday English and then having the audacity to sue people for daring to use that language themselves! App Store is only the recent tip of the iceberg.

It still doesn't negate my argument that the current patents and trademark systems are not there to protect anyone but rather to allow the wealthy and powerful to abuse smaller companies and individuals with impunity.

The whole legal framework needs to be rewritten for the model world 'cos it certainly ain't working as intended now!

40hz · « **Reply #12 on:** June 26, 2011, 05:04 PM »

Where is Xerox in all this? They invented the windowed interface - why aren't they suing Apple and Microsoft and Linux?
-Carol Haynes (June 26, 2011, 04:31 PM)

They did sue Apple back in 1990. See here for details. This occurred in the middle of Apple's lawsuit against Microsoft where Apple was ultimately denied the patentability of the desktop metaphor.

Xerox lost their suit too.

From Wikipedia (emphasis added);

In the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit, Xerox also sued Apple alleging that Mac's GUI was heavily based on Xerox's.[2] The district court dismissed Xerox's claims without addressing whether Apple's GUI infringed Xerox's, since the latter licensed it to the former back in 1979 for pre-IPO stock.

Apparently somebody forgot (or was afraid) to tell Xerox's Board of Directors that somebody in the company had already licensed the rights to Apple. (And for what amounted to 'chump change' at the time they did.)

Whoops!

Jimdoria · « **Reply #13 on:** June 27, 2011, 12:06 PM »

I definitely support the intent of the patent system. However, the issue (and perhaps this is due to "first to invent") is that large companies with the financial and legal resources to work the system have started claiming overly broad patents and then using this legal toehold to stifle / subdue competition.

If you as a small shop develop a multimedia streaming device that beats the pants off of anything Apple offers, but Apple owns the patent on "streaming multimedia over a network" your invention is essentially useless to you. Apple can step in and demand a cut of your profits so big that it puts you out of business, or just seek to put you out of business directly.

(BTW, not really picking on Apple here. Insert Microsoft or Oracle or even GE above if it makes you feel better.)

Now imagine you are an inventor who wants to avoid this scenario. What is your due diligence? An exhaustive patent search of any patent that might potentially cover the technology you're thinking of inventing? Better be a rich guy to start with. And once your search is done, you may find that any device you create (or part of any device you create) could conceivably be described by one or more existing patents. So you give up and switch to gardening, which stifles innovation - the exact opposite of the system's original intent.

The real crazy maker is that so many of these patents are not just over-broad but ACTUALLY PRIOR ART. They are patents for things that already existed well before the patent was filed. But the patent office grants the patent anyway, because they simply can't keep up with what's already in existence, and aren't really incentivized to do so anyway.

What's really needed is a more stringent definition of what's patentable. The Patent office used to require inventors include prototypes of their inventions along with their filing, until they ran out of room to keep everything. But now inventions are software or CAD designs, which take up only server storage space, which is more or less limitless. Maybe they should go back to the old system and require an actual, physical implementation of the invention in order to be eligible for the patent.

rjbull · « **Reply #14 on:** June 27, 2011, 03:46 PM »

another truth is that they all claim to have invented things they never did - and usually the little people who did the hard work in the first place either get screwed or paid money to shut up.
-Carol Haynes (June 26, 2011, 04:31 PM)

As Jimdoria notes, some companies have been awarded patents even where there was prior art, or where the invention was obvious to those skilled in the art. But that's a failure of the patent office, not necessarily of the legislation itself, and my impression was that the U.S. Patent Office was the worst culprit. That seems to mean a need for higher-quality staff, more staff, more training, and more moral fibre to stand up to clever presentation. At times I also wondered if national chauvinism played a part - if it isn't American, it isn't an invention, and who in the homeland cares about those damn foreigners anyway.

To me the perfect illustration of this distortion of legal intent is the companies trying to make trademarks out of normal everyday English and then having the audacity to sue people for daring to use that language themselves!

I too find this action arrogant and unacceptable. It isn't covered by patent law, though, and (in the UK at least) trademark/trade name law is a lot more lax.

It still doesn't negate my argument that the current patents and trademark systems are not there to protect anyone but rather to allow the wealthy and powerful to abuse smaller companies and individuals with impunity.

In my limited experience of a small corner of manufacturing industry, I feel that's greatly overstating the case... Is this in danger of becoming a case where urban myths and conspiracy theories are trumping dispassionate argument?

rjbull · « **Reply #15 on:** June 27, 2011, 04:03 PM »

large companies with the financial and legal resources to work the system have started claiming overly broad patents and then using this legal toehold to stifle / subdue competition.
-Jimdoria (June 27, 2011, 12:06 PM)

They're entitled to a broad patent - if they have truly invented a broad something. A rise in over-broad patents sounds like another case of patent office failure.

Now imagine you are an inventor who wants to avoid this scenario. What is your due diligence? An exhaustive patent search of any patent that might potentially cover the technology you're thinking of inventing? Better be a rich guy to start with. And once your search is done, you may find that any device you create (or part of any device you create) could conceivably be described by one or more existing patents. So you give up and switch to gardening, which stifles innovation - the exact opposite of the system's original intent.

It's not quite as bad as that, though I know what you mean. Most of the major patent offices now allow free access to their sites, but it's a tedious business to search them. You're better off using World Patent Index and/or INPADOC on Dialog or another host system, or Delphion Online, cheaper if a little less good. But, I maintain that most patents are in fact issued to big companies, and they should have the resources to searches as exhaustive as necessary. That sounds tough on the small man, but it's a big complicated world now. In fact, quite simple searches are often all that's necessary to make a yes/no decision on further work.

What's really needed is a more stringent definition of what's patentable. [...] Maybe they should go back to the old system and require an actual, physical implementation of the invention in order to be eligible for the patent.

I think some patent offices have, or at least had, another requirement to keep a patent in force: you had to "work the invention," i.e., you had to make and sell a product based on it. If you didn't, presumably the invention reverted to the public domain.

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #16 on:** June 27, 2011, 04:12 PM »

An earlier argument of mine from a lost thread applies - get the Alan Turing Estate to patent the Turing machine and since it is mathematically provable that ALL computers and algorithms are functionally equivalent to a Turning machine no one else would be allowed any patent for any technological 'breakthrough' as it would be covered under the Turning patent. It would also go some way to compensate him for the hideously nasty way he was treated by the UK government.

rjbull · « **Reply #17 on:** June 27, 2011, 04:32 PM »

An earlier argument of mine from a lost thread applies - get the Alan Turing Estate to patent the Turing machine and since it is mathematically provable that ALL computers and algorithms are functionally equivalent to a Turning machine no one else would be allowed any patent for any technological 'breakthrough' as it would be covered under the Turning patent.
-Carol Haynes (June 27, 2011, 04:12 PM)

They can't. If it's been published, and is therefore out in the public domain, it can't be retrospectively patented.

It would also go some way to compensate him for the hideously nasty way he was treated by the UK government.

Bit late...

Renegade · « **Reply #18 on:** June 27, 2011, 06:07 PM »

An earlier argument of mine from a lost thread applies - get the Alan Turing Estate to patent the Turing machine and since it is mathematically provable that ALL computers and algorithms are functionally equivalent to a Turning machine no one else would be allowed any patent for any technological 'breakthrough' as it would be covered under the Turning patent. It would also go some way to compensate him for the hideously nasty way he was treated by the UK government.
-Carol Haynes (June 27, 2011, 04:12 PM)

+1 Yay~!

The lunacy there would, or rather SHOULD make it obvious that mathematics should not be patentable, and by extension, software shouldn't either.

But actually, if the Turing Machine is already out there in the public domain, then isn't all software (and more than just that) then just a special case of it? Hmmm...

xtabber · « **Reply #19 on:** June 27, 2011, 10:36 PM »

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."

Adam Smith - An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 2, V.i.b (12) - Glasgow Edition p.715.

app103 · « **Reply #20 on:** June 27, 2011, 11:51 PM »

Now imagine you are an inventor who wants to avoid this scenario. What is your due diligence? An exhaustive patent search of any patent that might potentially cover the technology you're thinking of inventing? Better be a rich guy to start with. And once your search is done, you may find that any device you create (or part of any device you create) could conceivably be described by one or more existing patents. So you give up and switch to gardening, which stifles innovation - the exact opposite of the system's original intent.
-Jimdoria (June 27, 2011, 12:06 PM)

Gardening isn't exactly safe from patents, either. Don't plant more than one type of any plant too close to each other or you might cross-pollinate by accident and infringe on someone's patent with your new type of flower.

And if you are growing vegetables, you might end up with a letter from Monsanto's lawyers.

http://www.humanflow...patents_potted_gold/

40hz · « **Reply #21 on:** June 28, 2011, 02:51 AM »

^You don't even need an actual plant to run afoul of a patent when it comes to gardening.

There's a certain prolific inventor* who holds a patent on a method for plowing fields in order to reduce the need for water and irrigation.

Ready for this? It has nothing to do with how you plow the furrows or what tools you use to do it.

The patent is based on the compass direction relative to the geoposition of the field its furrows are plowed in.

So depending on where you're located, if you plow your fields in a certain direction, you're infringing on his patent. At least according to him and the morons at the USPTO who granted it.

He's claimed to have successfully enforced his patent against farmers and other 'agro' businesses. (Supposedly he's employed satellite imagery and hired planes to fly over and photograph fields in major farming areas looking for instances of infringement.)

Insane. $:-\$

-----------------------
* Can't remember this guy's name off the top of my head. But it should come to me eventually. I'll post it when I do.

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #22 on:** June 28, 2011, 05:39 AM »

Patent laws should have a sanity clause that allows anyone to challenge a patent on the grounds that it is patently bonkers.

There should also be a 'public good' clause that says no patent can be granted where it will infringe on public welfare - and that should include all bio-patents which to me are the very worst of all the patent stupidity foisted on the world by a barmy US system!

katykaty · « **Reply #23 on:** June 29, 2011, 12:45 PM »

Hell in the UK children have to be taught about 'citizenship' in schools - it is now a compulsory subject - but NO ONE in the UK is a CITIZEN - we are all SUBJECTS of the crown (if you are from the UK and don't believe me look in your Passport). Citizenship classes in schools should consist of a one line statement on day one of school "there is no such thing as a UK citizen"! There done, now lets get on with speaking the Queen's English.
-Carol Haynes (June 26, 2011, 08:38 AM)

This is an urban myth Carol. I don't know what's in your passport, but mine says I'm a British Citizen.

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #24 on:** June 29, 2011, 12:56 PM »

True - but if you read the notes section it also says that British Subjects have no right to live in the UK.

Actually the wording was changed with the introduction of the EU passport - the old black ones said British Subject (I still have one).

I suspect the wording was changed because of the EU rather than because of a change of status.

Did a bit of looking here is the Home Office Opinion:

http://www.ukba.home...ity/britishsubjects/

It doesn't alter the fact that as we have no Constitution or Bill of Rights UK Citizenship is pretty meaningless because we are all at the whim of the courts, politicians and ultimately the monarchy.