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..."
Patents are wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
The holding hostage of ideas is completely contrary to the basic natural rights that ideas have. The GPL is one way of fighting for the rights of software, but there really isn't a way to fight for the freedom of ideas.
In this century, the war to free ideas from patents will be waged as long and hard as the war a century ago against slavery. Information slavery is still slavery.
Ideas have rights.
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:3, Interesting)
Or so I believe. All I know for certain is this: I certainly hope that when it comes time for me to make a career choice, potential benefit to society, and not money, drives me.
Re:Reexamination usually doesn't invalidate patent (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally, I think it should just be made an offence to reap money from patents if it's your only source of revenue - AFAIK, there's no way that any of these companies have in any way inflicted monetary losses on a company that came up with a neat idea and never implemented it. Too bad that others got there before you. Heck, do these guys expect everyone to read the patent office library before we start coding?
Also, there should also be issues regarding how you go after people who 'break' patent laws. They should be forced to start with the companies that chronologically broke the patent laws first. It should be all or nothing, you can't just selectively pick who you're going to go after, that just isn't right.
And why the delay? Surely some kind of explanation is in order. Patents from 16 years ago and a company from 5 years ago look awfully fishy.
Maybe someone should patent making money off patents by sueing people who break patents you never used and who are oblivious to your patent existing.
The Trouble With Having Rights (Score:3, Interesting)
I, for one, have been in a position where I would prefer not to have intellectual property rights, on the grounds that I've had to give them up to an employer without compensation. If the creations had been in the public domain at the outset, then I would have had as much right in them as anyone else, but when employment contracts dictate that all works created during the term of employment (including those created out of work hours, on your own equipment) belong to the company, then "intellectual property rights" become a rod for an author's back.
See the long version at The Trouble With Having Rights [nutters.org], or the slightly briefer and less formal version of the same theme at The Intellectual Slave [nutters.org].
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:3, Interesting)
Clue for you: IP is NOT ideas. It's the implementation of those ideas.
A book is not an "idea". It's the implementation of the idea.
Software is not an "idea" -- "some way of typing in text and having it editable" is much different to the implementation that is a wordprocessor.
Music is not an "idea" -- there's a big difference between having all of the notes, or having this great idea for a cool ballad, and actually putting one together.
A film is not an "idea" -- compare with a book. You might have an idea for a plot, but it's much different to the work involved in creating a finished product.
In other words, good ideas may be a dime a dozen. However, the difference between an idea and IP is the whole process of putting that idea to work. And that can be very long -- anything from weeks to months to years -- very tedious, and take a hell of a lot of work, creativity and energy to deliver on that.
But hey, I've got this great idea for a piece of mail software that ties everything in your addressbook to the time it arrives, and works out when you really should get around to emailing that person who you forgot to reply to.
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?
I can't, you say? I'll have to write all the software behind it?
Then it's more than just an idea. It's a shitload of work.
Re:Excuse me while I hurl (Score:2, Interesting)
I think your incentive to create would depend on two factors:
- Are you close to starving and being homeless?
- Are you excessively greedy?
If starving, then of course you have a disincentive to write fulltime given the knowledge that no one will trade you money/food for your work; a dayjob would suck up much of your time. If on the other hand you're already well off, then only excessive greed would be the disincentive to create, since most true artists in either situation would still create for the sheer joy of it (and for the "whuffie" reputation, like in scientific communities).Oh, and thanks for your Fair and Balanced post differentiating the three types of "IP" that usually get conflated as ... IP. :)
Patents should be limited but not abolished. (Score:2, Interesting)
If something has no development cost or cost to test etc., then the patent length is 1 year. You'd have to create a sliding scale up to a max of 20 years. (Should be 5 for software)
The patent office whould be the judge, I suppose, so they'd have to hire a pile of accountants to be able to investigate and dismiss inflated costs.
If software patents keep going like they are, the industry will grind to a halt where nobody will be able to build on the work of others. Copyright is a whole other ball game and is less broken than the patent system. - as long as copyrights don't become indefinite.
Re: SCO and PanIp... The second Bob Newhart show had an episode where Josee Ferrer's (rich old guy) character was describing the work of of a relative who made a living by suing people. He described the fellow's profession as being a "suer". (pronounced like sewer as in sewer pipe) :)
Re:Patents are wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
So tell me? What did Stallman do to pay the rent and eat before he became a MacArthur fellow?
Dame Rumor says he implemented. I recall hearing back in '94-'96 or so that he commanded a very hefty hourly rate for consulting, mostly extending emacs and the like for companies that wanted useful tools.
Of course, I understand a lot of that went straight back into FSF. I did confuse him for a bum (sorry, but that's truth) when I first saw him, so he clearly wasn't spending much on himself.
That's the rumor. How true it is, I have no idea...
He also sold hardcopy manuals. (Score:4, Interesting)
Dame Rumor says he implemented. I recall hearing back in '94-'96 or so that he commanded a very hefty hourly rate for consulting, mostly extending emacs and the like for companies that wanted useful tools.
He also sold hardcopy manuals for emacs - first printer output, then paperback.
They were actually a hardcopy of the softcopy manual that was packaged in the distribution. But having a hardcopy was convenient, and a lot of emacs users didn't have a printer and/or had to pay big per-page fees for output in those days - and/or wanted to support Stallman and were willing to contrubte a few bucks.
I think I actually bought one from him in those days. But I didn't end up using emacs, due to RAM limitations on my machines up through the time that I had vi hardwired in my nervous system's firmware. So if I did get one "It's Filed" - in the Ted Nelson sense of buried in the midden. B-)
Re:Patents hurting the ecconomy (Score:3, Interesting)
In order for some idea to be patentable. it most have a unique, functional, tangible expression and it must truly be innovative (not otherwise exist).
I think you'll find that this nicely leaves out patent abominations such as software and business practices. Software is sufficiently protected by copyright. Business practices have not been subject of intellectual property law until recently. Including them under any form of IP is a mistake.
I disagree with your comment about trade secrets and NDAs. Once something has a tangible expression and is being sold, it is difficult to impossible to keep a competitor from disecting it. Patents are effective at preventing someone else from simply imitating. They at least have to figure out how it was done and then how to do it differently enough to not infringe.
Re:Reexamination usually doesn't invalidate patent (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it this clear cut? Can't you still attempt to have a court overturn a patent, by (in effect) challenging the Patent Office's ruling about the novelness and non-obvious of the invention? Surely any prior art may be relevant to this, whether "known" to the PTO or not?
Re:Patents are wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Software, on the otherhand, should not be patentable, any more than a math algorithm is patentable.
As for copyright, I support limited copyright. I personally think 20 years is a good term for ALL copyrighted works.
Definitely prior art (Score:3, Interesting)
Note: I was the person who coded the C64 side of this for PlayNet.