PanIP May Be Standing On Shaky Ground 261
GoatEnigma writes "You may remember the name PanIP, the company trying to hold e-commerce hostage with their patents. Well, according to this update on the PanIP Defendants site, it might not be as easy as they thought. Apparently a little bit of successful legal opposition has slowed down their nefarious scheme. Tim claims to have found evidence to undermine their patents, although the article is very short on details as to what this evidence might be..."
Reexamination usually doesn't invalidate patents (Score:5, Informative)
The other problem with reexamination is what happens to all the documentation submitted to the PTO to cause the reexamination to happen. If the patent is allowed to stand but the scope of the claims is narrowed, the new documents are added to the list of 'known prior art' in the patent. These documents can no longer be used to try to invalidate the patent once the reexamination process is complete -- as the PTO has in effect 'blessed' those documents, asserting that the patent is valid in spite of them.
So, reexamination is a double edged sword. You may end up with stronger patent, and all of your best ammunition voided.
IANAL, but I have fought a couple of patents. Won one and lost one.
thad
Good job guys (Score:4, Informative)
If anyone here is looking for an excellent source for fine chocolate, check out Tim Beere's "patent infringing" website, Debrand Fine Chocolate [debrand.com].
Re:The Trouble With Having Rights (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to hang your own shingle as a software programmer and make a decent living, you'd better support at least a short time-limited copyright if you want to create your own products. Sure, you can contract yourself out to other companies to produce their programs for them, but if you ever want to make your own software as a living there's got to be incentive there. Without copyright law, as soon as one person has it the cat's out of the bag - so either gorge your first customer for the $60k you needed to live while writing it, or starve.
If you want a steady easy paycheck, but want rights to the work you do outside of your employment, you should negotiate it when signing up to work for a company. In the U.S. at least, it's standard to have a list of exemptions in the employee contract - make use of it. If it isn't there, write one and require that they sign it before signing yours. Hire a lawyer to whip one up for you if you need.
If you want rights to what you do at work - try talking them into doing it as open source. If it's a piece of code that would be of benefit to others, but wouldn't harm their competitiveness with other companies, you can probably succeed if you can voice your reasoning well and defend it. Of course, if what you are working on is trade secret for the company and is the heart of their business - good luck. Remember, those paychecks have to come from somewhere - usually its customers buying something they couldn't get for free at an equally high quality elsewhere.
If you want the law on your side - get a visa and move to California. They have some of the most employee-friendly state laws regarding copyright, patents, and other IP that I've seen. In some cases they may override your employer's contract. Hire a lawyer.
Here's an interesting article on copyright law [findlaw.com] with some pointers. I don't know how similar Australia's laws are.
Re:Now, the Future. (Score:1, Informative)
Perhaps you're thinking of salary, where Roman soldiers were paid in salt (which was essentially legal tender). That's also the origin of the phrase "worth one's salt".
I'm not aware of any historical salt tax that worked the way you describe (pay up or get no salt). Sounds like simple commerce, really. The poor have never had a good time of it.
Re:Excuse me while I hurl (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:4, Informative)
Now... if this is an 'idea' 'based on the environment of ideas built from what came before', then please tell me where I can download my "idea" from, so I can make use of it?
Don't even bother. I've patented the ideas of "downloading mail". "storing addresses in an address book", and "recording times of arrivals". Even if you put these three things together to make some really cool software nobody thought of, it would still infringe on my patents.
And thats the parent's point. If I patent the basic idea of an email client, all developement in the email client world grinds to a halt, except for my say-so. And this is whats happening. A friend of mine made a start-up company about a year ago. He and some of his friends got together and thought "gee, lets do something cool" so they got together a list of 4 or 5 ideas for "cool new programs" that he had never seen and would have loved to have, and decided to get them checked out with a patent attourney. Over $10,000 in fees later, only one of those things on the list didn't have a patent covering it. Not that any of the other things exist, a year later, but hey, I'm sure someone's doing "a shitload of work" waiting for someone else to invent it so they can sue for their income. So these other 4 ideas? They'll sit there waiting as bait for the next stupid programmer to come along.
Re:Corn farmers... (Score:5, Informative)