For me, it's not just the prior art and/or obviousness of this kind of patent that should make it invalid. You can often argue about those until the cows come home - whether a particular thing counts as prior art or whether people would really have considered this as obvious at the time, can be rather subjective.
For me it's the lack of any real disclosure that annoys me. Patents are supposed to provide sufficient information that a person skilled in the art can reproduce it with relative ease. Generally this means it should be sufficiently detailed that the recipient does not need to add any significant creativity or ingenuity of his own.
So for example, if I were attempting to patent the Carburetor, I should need to provide blueprints and specifications such that anyone with a workshop and sufficient skill would be able to build one. It would be no good me putting "a device that mixes gasoline and air" and more or less leaving it at that! Even a lengthy explanation of what it does and the principles on which it operates would still be considered insufficient disclosure in most fields.
The equivalent disclosure for software patents should be to provide full source code such that any reasonably skilled developer can reproduce the invention without writing the thing from scratch himself.
Yes, I've read about it - like you I think they've got some way to go to make it an interesting proposition to the "average joe".
It helps with the cost issue - replacing a rental fee with a one off payment of what - $60 or something like that? That's an improvement but I think they still have a hill to climb to persuade millions of people to shell out for one. They need a killer app - the idea they're running with of it helping you retain control over your private data probably isn't enough of an incentive on its own to get most to open their wallets.
True, but then there's also the cost of running a Diaspora node, or equivalent, that needs to be addressed.
With free software we're lucky that the economics works in our favour - although we aim to emphasize the freedom aspect over "free-as-in-beer", the latter undoubtedly plays a big part when it comes to the widespread adoption of a particular application.
As others have already said, p2p is one solution to the cost problem, but risks taking a step back in ease of use, as you now need a social networking client application instead of just firing up a browser. Might work with mobile apps though.
Now if there were a p2p based system that ran in the browser, maybe that would be the sweet spot. I'm not sure that such as thing is currently possible though.
We talk a lot here about how piracy can be dealt with if the entertainment industry offered an alternative that had most of the same content as file-sharing, but was simple to use and more convenient.
With social networking, the boot is pretty much on the other foot - Facebook et al are the easy option (just sign up and go), while the open distributed alternatives like Diaspora typically require you to install the software on a server (which you will need to buy or rent).
Until this problem is solved, I don't see any distributed alternative to Facebook getting any traction outside of the "geek" community.
Again, it's good that some research into that "significant harm" will be carried out, but shouldn't that come before the legislation is drawn up and enacted, not after it?
Well, yes - but since the "research" is almost certainly going to involve going to the entertainment industry and asking "how much do you think you've been harmed" - it probably doesn't matter whether it is done before or after the legislation.
While I agree that the pledge might not have any effect by itself - what it would do, if enough companies signed up, is act as a clear message to congress that patents are anti-innovation.
After all companies signing this pledge are effectively turning down a potential revenue stream, because they recognise that it is against their wider interest.
Yeah, this definitely looks like Google throwing down the gauntlet to Apple.
Effectively they're saying, look, we see how instead of suing us you're suing HTC and Samsung because you think they're easier to bully - but now, if you want to close down Android, you're going to have to bring the game to us.
I didn't think it would be long before the Nazis found their way into the discussion ;-)
Are you saying that there were people during WWII that believed that sending millions of Jews to the gas chamber was not only acceptable, but somehow believed that such actions were beyond reproach and could not imagine coming under future criticism?
Maybe there were such people, I admit I can't see into minds of such people.
This isn't quite where I was going with my argument though. There is a difference between people that are considered heroes while they were able keep terrible acts under wraps who are then judged harshly when such acts come to light - and what I was discussing above of actions that were widely known about and approved of at the time but would not be approved of today.
I'm not convinced this is necessarily something to worry about either. Again you have to look at equivalent situations today.
People do not generally "rejudge" peoples past actions without making allowances for the fact that such actions might have been considered OK at the time.
For example today it is considered stupid and reckless for a man to promiscuously engage in unprotected sex with a number of women, but you would not consider someone who behaved like this during the 60s to be stupid. Instead you would correctly recognise that they could not possibly have known about things like HIV back then.
And if the you and your lawyers all have drunken photos and such on-line too?
What I think AC is getting at is that we're in a transitional period when it comes to social networking. Rather than everyone suddenly realising what a terrible mistake they've made in putting so much of their personal lives on-line, it could just as easily go the other way and society could redefine what is considered "personal information".
If the next generation considers it the norm to make public what we would consider private, then there wouldn't be anything to gain in someone else digging it up. Just a few decades ago, a couple living together and raising children out of wedlock would be considered a terrible scandal and make them pariahs in the local community, while today it is considered perfectly acceptable and not unusual. Today's scandals are often tomorrow's banalities.
Well, of course it's perfectly valid to use photoshopped images - these are intended to represent the reflections vain women see in the mirror after applying moisturiser with 1000% markup. Such delusions cannot be captured with a camera lens ;-)
But the Court didn't really look at that issue. All the court was asked to rule on was (a) whether or not visiting a website (or receiving an email) could involve making an infringing copy, and (b) whether or not the temporary copying defence applies. The court found yes, for (a), and no, for (b).
Well, IANAL but for reference here is the bit of UK Copyright Law that refers to temporary copies :
Section 28A: Making of temporary copies.
Copyright in a literary work, other than a computer program or a database, or in a dramatic, musical or artistic work, the typographical arrangement of a published edition, a sound recording or a film, is not infringed by the making of a temporary copy which is transient or incidental, which is an integral and essential part of a technological process and the sole purpose of which is to enable -
(a) a transmission of the work in a network between third parties by an intermediary; or
(b) a lawful use of the work;
and which has no independent economic significance.
To me, that clearly applies to the activity of browsing the web. So the web isn't "broken in the UK".
I'm not a physicist but I think the idea is that as you approach the speed of light time slows down for you relative to everywhere else. That means from your point of view, time seems the same inside your ship but the outside world's "clock" gets faster and faster, meaning Causes get closer and closer to Effects.
If you were able to exceed the speed of light it would appear (again from your POV) that Effects start to precede the Causes i.e. time in the rest of the universe would appear to be running backwards. In principle, you could then slam the brakes on and be in the past.
As you correctly point out - no-one has believed for decades that time travel using this method was possible - Special Relativity itself predicts that you would need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to the speed of light.
What most physicists (including Stephen Hawking) are betting on as being more likely is the possibility of being able to "warp" spacetime in such a fashion that you could bring a more distant patch of space (or time) closer. You could then travel to it at a speed less that that of light and then let it "snap back" to it's previous position. This would, in theory, allow FTL travel and in certain cases possibly time travel.
Although there are indications that this might be exceedingly difficult (AIUI you need to borrow a massive amount of "vacuum energy" to make it work), it hasn't actually been disproved yet - and it doesn't sound as if this paper even addresses this method of travel.
(Whew, step away from chalkboard David, step away... ;-)
Ok, I am off my soap box. Keep fighting the good fight.
Well, this is kind of the point. Mike is, day after day, getting on his soapbox and, as you say, fighting the good fight.
You see, the reason why we have such awful copyright and patent laws is because Hollywood, the RIAA and in this case Wall St. all have big lobbying budgets and get the ears of congress - while "We the people" on average tend to be more "meh - I'd rather have a tax break".
Because, unless you know a few billionaire philanthropists you can get on side, the only thing that's going to get a bigger voice in congress and the senate than these lobbyists is to get the voting public to start raising a stink en-masse about how IP laws aren't looking after their interests.
So, every time Mike or someone like him gets someone like you or I worked up enough to write to our representatives or sign a petition, that's one tiny step closer to hopefully getting this mess sorted out.
The crazy thing is how shortsighted it all is. A company invents a way to streamline online processing and thinks "not only will this make us more profitable, but if I patent it and prevent others from using it, it will make us even more profitable"
What they fail to take into account is by the time all their competitors have jumped onto the patent bandwagon all that extra profit (and probably more besides) is frittered away on license fees.
This is a lot like someone suing local government after tripping over a broken paving stone and thinking they're in the money - but failing to appreciate that over the long term the necessarily higher taxes mean they end up effectively paying for their own payout.
I imagine that such a move will show up in the industry... er... I mean the USTR's annual Special 301 report as evidence as to why Russia doesn't "respect" copyright law enough
So this would mean that Russia would be considered to be, like, a sort of enemy of the USA?
But as new document formats contain new features that the old formats don't have, it's reasonable to expect the old version not to be able to open the new format.
Only if the file format is poorly designed. It's not that hard to come up with a way of representing the data such that older versions can just skip the information it doesn't understand.
The problem is that in a lot of cases, especially with software that was originally written a good while ago, the file format is often not much more than a dump to disk of the document's in-memory representation. From a programmer's point of view this is the easiest thing to implement, but it suffers from exactly this sort of problem - and if the company has an effective monopoly in the market, there's not much incentive to replace it with something more flexible.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
You know what you get with "monthly password changes with no repeats"?
password1
password2
password3
password4
...
So then you really ramp up the security and insist on mixed case with mandatory punctuation characters ...
%Password1
%Password2
%Password3
%Password4
...
Disclosure
For me, it's not just the prior art and/or obviousness of this kind of patent that should make it invalid. You can often argue about those until the cows come home - whether a particular thing counts as prior art or whether people would really have considered this as obvious at the time, can be rather subjective.
For me it's the lack of any real disclosure that annoys me. Patents are supposed to provide sufficient information that a person skilled in the art can reproduce it with relative ease. Generally this means it should be sufficiently detailed that the recipient does not need to add any significant creativity or ingenuity of his own.
So for example, if I were attempting to patent the Carburetor, I should need to provide blueprints and specifications such that anyone with a workshop and sufficient skill would be able to build one. It would be no good me putting "a device that mixes gasoline and air" and more or less leaving it at that! Even a lengthy explanation of what it does and the principles on which it operates would still be considered insufficient disclosure in most fields.
The equivalent disclosure for software patents should be to provide full source code such that any reasonably skilled developer can reproduce the invention without writing the thing from scratch himself.
Re: Re: New Texas voter!
Ok, now you're just making me remember stuff probably best left forgotten ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Smith_%28TV_series%29
Mind you, maybe this Mr Smith would be a better candidate ... he could hardly do a worse job.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Yes, I've read about it - like you I think they've got some way to go to make it an interesting proposition to the "average joe".
It helps with the cost issue - replacing a rental fee with a one off payment of what - $60 or something like that? That's an improvement but I think they still have a hill to climb to persuade millions of people to shell out for one. They need a killer app - the idea they're running with of it helping you retain control over your private data probably isn't enough of an incentive on its own to get most to open their wallets.
Re: Re:
True, but then there's also the cost of running a Diaspora node, or equivalent, that needs to be addressed.
With free software we're lucky that the economics works in our favour - although we aim to emphasize the freedom aspect over "free-as-in-beer", the latter undoubtedly plays a big part when it comes to the widespread adoption of a particular application.
As others have already said, p2p is one solution to the cost problem, but risks taking a step back in ease of use, as you now need a social networking client application instead of just firing up a browser. Might work with mobile apps though.
Now if there were a p2p based system that ran in the browser, maybe that would be the sweet spot. I'm not sure that such as thing is currently possible though.
(untitled comment)
We talk a lot here about how piracy can be dealt with if the entertainment industry offered an alternative that had most of the same content as file-sharing, but was simple to use and more convenient.
With social networking, the boot is pretty much on the other foot - Facebook et al are the easy option (just sign up and go), while the open distributed alternatives like Diaspora typically require you to install the software on a server (which you will need to buy or rent).
Until this problem is solved, I don't see any distributed alternative to Facebook getting any traction outside of the "geek" community.
Significant Harm
Well, yes - but since the "research" is almost certainly going to involve going to the entertainment industry and asking "how much do you think you've been harmed" - it probably doesn't matter whether it is done before or after the legislation.
Anti-innovation Pledge
While I agree that the pledge might not have any effect by itself - what it would do, if enough companies signed up, is act as a clear message to congress that patents are anti-innovation.
After all companies signing this pledge are effectively turning down a potential revenue stream, because they recognise that it is against their wider interest.
Re: all in
Yeah, this definitely looks like Google throwing down the gauntlet to Apple.
Effectively they're saying, look, we see how instead of suing us you're suing HTC and Samsung because you think they're easier to bully - but now, if you want to close down Android, you're going to have to bring the game to us.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I didn't think it would be long before the Nazis found their way into the discussion ;-)
Are you saying that there were people during WWII that believed that sending millions of Jews to the gas chamber was not only acceptable, but somehow believed that such actions were beyond reproach and could not imagine coming under future criticism?
Maybe there were such people, I admit I can't see into minds of such people.
This isn't quite where I was going with my argument though. There is a difference between people that are considered heroes while they were able keep terrible acts under wraps who are then judged harshly when such acts come to light - and what I was discussing above of actions that were widely known about and approved of at the time but would not be approved of today.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm not convinced this is necessarily something to worry about either. Again you have to look at equivalent situations today.
People do not generally "rejudge" peoples past actions without making allowances for the fact that such actions might have been considered OK at the time.
For example today it is considered stupid and reckless for a man to promiscuously engage in unprotected sex with a number of women, but you would not consider someone who behaved like this during the 60s to be stupid. Instead you would correctly recognise that they could not possibly have known about things like HIV back then.
Re: Re:
And if the you and your lawyers all have drunken photos and such on-line too?
What I think AC is getting at is that we're in a transitional period when it comes to social networking. Rather than everyone suddenly realising what a terrible mistake they've made in putting so much of their personal lives on-line, it could just as easily go the other way and society could redefine what is considered "personal information".
If the next generation considers it the norm to make public what we would consider private, then there wouldn't be anything to gain in someone else digging it up. Just a few decades ago, a couple living together and raising children out of wedlock would be considered a terrible scandal and make them pariahs in the local community, while today it is considered perfectly acceptable and not unusual. Today's scandals are often tomorrow's banalities.
(untitled comment)
Well, of course it's perfectly valid to use photoshopped images - these are intended to represent the reflections vain women see in the mirror after applying moisturiser with 1000% markup. Such delusions cannot be captured with a camera lens ;-)
Re:
Well, IANAL but for reference here is the bit of UK Copyright Law that refers to temporary copies :
Section 28A: Making of temporary copies.
Copyright in a literary work, other than a computer program or a database, or in a dramatic, musical or artistic work, the typographical arrangement of a published edition, a sound recording or a film, is not infringed by the making of a temporary copy which is transient or incidental, which is an integral and essential part of a technological process and the sole purpose of which is to enable -
(a) a transmission of the work in a network between third parties by an intermediary; or
(b) a lawful use of the work;
and which has no independent economic significance.
To me, that clearly applies to the activity of browsing the web. So the web isn't "broken in the UK".
Re: Time is but an illusion
I'm not a physicist but I think the idea is that as you approach the speed of light time slows down for you relative to everywhere else. That means from your point of view, time seems the same inside your ship but the outside world's "clock" gets faster and faster, meaning Causes get closer and closer to Effects.
If you were able to exceed the speed of light it would appear (again from your POV) that Effects start to precede the Causes i.e. time in the rest of the universe would appear to be running backwards. In principle, you could then slam the brakes on and be in the past.
As you correctly point out - no-one has believed for decades that time travel using this method was possible - Special Relativity itself predicts that you would need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to the speed of light.
What most physicists (including Stephen Hawking) are betting on as being more likely is the possibility of being able to "warp" spacetime in such a fashion that you could bring a more distant patch of space (or time) closer. You could then travel to it at a speed less that that of light and then let it "snap back" to it's previous position. This would, in theory, allow FTL travel and in certain cases possibly time travel.
Although there are indications that this might be exceedingly difficult (AIUI you need to borrow a massive amount of "vacuum energy" to make it work), it hasn't actually been disproved yet - and it doesn't sound as if this paper even addresses this method of travel.
(Whew, step away from chalkboard David, step away... ;-)
This is how...
Well, this is kind of the point. Mike is, day after day, getting on his soapbox and, as you say, fighting the good fight.
You see, the reason why we have such awful copyright and patent laws is because Hollywood, the RIAA and in this case Wall St. all have big lobbying budgets and get the ears of congress - while "We the people" on average tend to be more "meh - I'd rather have a tax break".
Because, unless you know a few billionaire philanthropists you can get on side, the only thing that's going to get a bigger voice in congress and the senate than these lobbyists is to get the voting public to start raising a stink en-masse about how IP laws aren't looking after their interests.
So, every time Mike or someone like him gets someone like you or I worked up enough to write to our representatives or sign a petition, that's one tiny step closer to hopefully getting this mess sorted out.
Re:
The crazy thing is how shortsighted it all is. A company invents a way to streamline online processing and thinks "not only will this make us more profitable, but if I patent it and prevent others from using it, it will make us even more profitable"
What they fail to take into account is by the time all their competitors have jumped onto the patent bandwagon all that extra profit (and probably more besides) is frittered away on license fees.
This is a lot like someone suing local government after tripping over a broken paving stone and thinking they're in the money - but failing to appreciate that over the long term the necessarily higher taxes mean they end up effectively paying for their own payout.
(untitled comment)
I imagine that such a move will show up in the industry... er... I mean the USTR's annual Special 301 report as evidence as to why Russia doesn't "respect" copyright law enough
So this would mean that Russia would be considered to be, like, a sort of enemy of the USA?
Yes, I can see how that would bother them ...
(untitled comment)
Eric, if I were you I'd just tell the magazine to @spin on it!
Re: Re: Re: Re: Autodesk does this and many others as well
But as new document formats contain new features that the old formats don't have, it's reasonable to expect the old version not to be able to open the new format.
Only if the file format is poorly designed. It's not that hard to come up with a way of representing the data such that older versions can just skip the information it doesn't understand.
The problem is that in a lot of cases, especially with software that was originally written a good while ago, the file format is often not much more than a dump to disk of the document's in-memory representation. From a programmer's point of view this is the easiest thing to implement, but it suffers from exactly this sort of problem - and if the company has an effective monopoly in the market, there's not much incentive to replace it with something more flexible.