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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..."
Obviously... (Score:5, Funny)
Duh. Obviously, they found it had been copied from SCO source.
Re:Obviously... (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Patents are wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
If somebody wants to give me $50k/yr for the next 10 years, I'll be happy to expound upon how wonderful it would be to not have to earn a living
until year 11 that is...
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 are wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Patents are wrong (Score:2)
Excuse me while I hurl (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents and copyrights were intended to provide an incentive for people to create new things. As an example, if I am an author, what is my incentive to continue to write if my works can be freely copied? Likewise, why should a pharmaceutical comapany work to discover, refine and test a new medecine if the moment it comes out anyone else can make their own copy of it without incurring the development costs?
Intellectual property laws are a necessity for modern society. Sadly, some people like SCO and PanIP have subverted those laws to try to gain from works they had nothing to do with. Luckily for the open source community, the ambulance chasers at SCO were stupid enough to go after somebody big instead of being bottom feeders like PanIP and just hitting little guys for licensing fees.
Re:Excuse me while I hurl (Score:5, Insightful)
Close, but not quite. These laws were created so that people would create new things - and that after they'ed recouped cost + some profit, those things would flow into the public domain.
Re:Excuse me while I hurl (Score:2, Interesting)
I think your incentive to create would depend on two factors:
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 disincen
Re:Excuse me while I hurl (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Excuse me while I hurl (Score:3, Insightful)
By creating false monopolies in certain markets we allow monopolistic practices and huge economic waste.
Let's say you are Monsanto, you have a patent on drug Z for 14 years. You have no competition and so you get to set the price. Now, your instinct will not be to recoup the research plus 12% profit over 14 years, it will be to set t
Re:Excuse me while I hurl (Score:2)
Here's something to keep in mind everyone from Pfizer or whatever talks about how the pricing is justifiable an
Re:Excuse me while I hurl (Score:2)
Oh no, those poor people can't make money if the government doesn't protect them from the poor evil copycats.
There is no way that someone who comes up with the cure for cancer won't make money, regardless of who copies it. For one, there is the process to make the drug, which is usually not protected by copyright law. You know how to make it because you came up with the drug, nobody
Re:Excuse me while I hurl (Score:2)
Re:Excuse me while I hurl (Score:2)
Corn farmers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Corn farmers... (Score:2)
So, what diseases does your corn stalk cure? Oh, it doesn't.
So, how many people are entertained by watching your corn stalk grow? Oh, not many.
So, how many people does your corn stalk seat and how fast does it do 0 to 60? Oh, it doesn't.
So, what diminished costs do the corn pirates face if they buy some of my corn and plant it? No cost of owning the farm to grow it on? No fertilizer? No harvesting costs? No silage costs? Oh, they're the same u
Re:Corn farmers... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Corn farmers... (Score:2)
So, what diminished costs do music pirates face ? Do they have no computer to decode the mp3? No hard drive to store the mp3? No opportunity costs involved in finding the mp3 in the first place? No network costs? No cost cd-r's to burn them to? Why exactly can't the record companies harness the same technology that makes digital music so inexpensive to distribute on an ad-hoc basis? And exactly
Re:Corn farmers... (Score:2)
To grow corn with some success and in any sort of really "usable" quantity (a stalk of corn gets you fed for what, a day?), it requires considerable effort, thought, and planning. Obviously you've never been a farmer if you think that all there is to growing corn is dropping a kernel into the ground and watching it grow.
For example, what kind of soil are you trying to grow corn in? Try planting that kernel in the desert. Or in a peat-bog. So, if you live in a desert and yo
Re:Excuse me while I hurl (Score:2)
Say you wrote a book and published it. Without copyright, a larger more influential publisher could publish your work without attribution and profit from it.
If you find that just, you are just plain insane.
Re:Excuse me while I hurl (Score:2)
Yes and no. They could publish it, but copyright is not in itself necessary for proving authorship. That is, they wouldn't necessarily be able to claim someone else wrote it. Now, having copyright makes enforcing such attributions easier (practical), but like its name says, "copyright" just defines mechanism for granting right to copy (publish) such works, it does not define rules of aut
Re:Excuse me while I hurl (Score:2)
Why publish anything if some scumbag is going to steal your work and profit from it?
Writing is a profession and the notion that you "own" what you produce is a fundamental truth.
No patents can be good (Score:3, Insightful)
Like say you invent a process for making a room temperature superconductor. This is an idea worth a lot to a lot of people. You deserve to make money off of it, given that you did something truly innovative to come up with it (it isn't like people haven't been trying). But suppose to mass produce these thigns it will take a $4 billion fabri
Re:Patents are wrong (Score:2)
As an earlier post mentioned, this brief period of time gives someone an incentive to develop new technologies and intangible works because they can recoup their large investments with a short monopoly period.
What we have now is virtual perpetual patents and copyrights which promotes nothing but
Re:Patents are wrong (Score:2)
Without IP, there's no GPL, only public domain. The GPL itself relies on copyright law to produce a contract that limits what you can do with the source code you've copied, limited in ways that the designers of the GPL thought would most greatly encourage sharing of source code.
Re:Patents are wrong (Score:2)
My ideas are mine to do what I will with. If I wish to hoard them, and not share them with you, that should be my right. I owe my ideas nothing. In fact, I can think up all kinds of ways to benefit humanity, and still have no obligation to share them with you. They are MY ideas, to examine, refine, and ponder over on long sleepless nights.
Conversely, I don't think someone should be allowed to call shotgun on
Re:Patents are wrong (Score:2)
GPL involves copyright laws, and not ideas per se.
Patent laws protect inventions, but not ideas. They also protect Business Methods, but this was as a result of evolution through case outcomes, much like they are used in cases involving software, thanks to some case law involving IBM a while ago.
Patent law is being used to the benefit of the cleverest (draw your own conclusions as to what "cleverest" implies), but this does
Re:Patents are wrong (Score:2)
Right, but implementations should be patentable.
I can't say, "Gee, I made a machine that mills cotton," and then prevent anyone from milling cotton - I get protection on my machine so people can't rip it off.
Even in pharmaceuticals, you can get a patent on a drug that treats asthma, but you can't get a patent on treating asthma.
Similarly, I should be able to patent a system for purchasing items with a single click - so people can't rip it off. What I'm not supposed to do is get a
Re:Patents are wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a nice theory.
It's not, however, how the patent system appears to be working anymore.
These days you spend ten years working on making an idea work and finally bring it to the market only to get sued for any profit you'll ever make from it by a company that's never had either any intention o
if you can have a generic e-commerce patent (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever happened to the 20% different dealy, whereby eBay isn't affected because its code (the way it works) is 20%(100%?) different from the subject of the patent? This is why software patents are so moronic, any re-implimentation works differently, or falls under the original copyright.
SCO's gone, let's all DoS the patent office next!
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
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, the
Re:Reexamination usually doesn't invalidate patent (Score:2)
Reading patents is dangerous buisness. For pretty much any computer program a programmer is ever likely to write he is very likely to violate one or more patents in the process. The way the system is set up today it's close to impossible to avoid it, with all the overbroad and/or trivial patents granted.
If you read and know about the patents you are engaging in willful violation and you can be liable for larger
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?
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:Good job guys (Score:2)
Brazen (Score:3, Funny)
Prior art? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Definitely prior art (Score:3, Interesting)
Note: I was the person who co
Defense fund donations? (Score:2, Insightful)
a.)Had gotten a judgement for 19000 against PanIP.
b.)Wanted donations to cover their expenses.
So these some 15 or 20 companies didn't feel like they benifited sufficiently from their investment? Granted a judgement does not a payment make and I'd be interested in donating (in spite of my poverty) but...... I think they'd see a lot of nickels and dimes (mine included )if there was more detailed info on whats been done (the court action and created jurisprudence i
Re:Defense fund donations? (Score:2)
It just might be that they can't release the info you want due to the advise of thier counsel, or perhaps even a court order. Most businessmen are ethical, honest and forthright, it's only when the figures get too large that we end up with the Darly McBrides of the world. As well, they seem to have good counsel - which I'm sure will cost them in excess of $19K.
Give them that nickel or dime, dud
Re:Defense fund donations? (Score:2)
Which leaves them back at $0 that they've actually made from the PanIP mess, plus a whole slew of other legal fees from the original (and still ongoi
Someone patented Bartering? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now IANAL but how do you patent the bartering system. Are you saying that the consumer has to pay royalties for neogeoating a better price with a company?
Someone needs to reign in the USPTO very quickly before this all begins to get out of hand. What are we to do when your legal system is overwhelmed with lawsuits that real crimes such as theft and murder begin to take a back seat to big business lawsuits making the lawyers millions of dollars.
Or what if it becomes so lucrative (Probably has already happened) that lawyers wont represent the defendants and instead concentrate on convincing companies with patents that other companies are violating their IP and that sueing is something they should do.
This all falls back to SCO (Just an Example) instead of producing a workable product they've relied on litigation to sustain the company. It's beyond me why any worker at SCO (Other than our current economic situation) would stay with a company that could find itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit. It's like the Enron situation has not driven it home to them yet.
But again I ask people to write their congressmen and women and all their other elected officials and point out the problems inherent with patenting many things the way it goes on.
Business is just that business. I can understand patenting a process to make a 5 dollar diamond processor and a special chemical forumlae that cures cancer it's in their interest to make money after investing millions in developing these products. But patenting things such as door to door salesmanship or basic E Commerce systems is just damaging to the E-Economy.
If anyone deserved any patents it's the designers of the coding systems such as Basic, C, C++, C#, PHP and myraid of other languages. Of which none were expressly written with 2 billion ways to write code that would say yes or no. If we continue this madness then someone might as well patent the 0 and the 1 while they're at it.
Re:Someone patented Bartering? (Score:2)
barter (bartr)
v. intr. To trade goods or services without the exchange of money.
v. tr. To trade (goods or services) without the exchange of money.
I know this is entirely irrelevant to your point, I'm just being a nitpicky prick today.
Probably cause I was 15 (Score:2)
School tends to focus on the past and not our present so children are not prepared for the current world they're still thinking of cowboys and indians, Russian Czars and French Revolutions.
Annoying trend? (Score:2, Funny)
A lot of that going around these days, isn't there?
I'm wondering what implications all this top-secret evidence non-sense will have in the long run. Are we soon going to see court cases where all of the evidence is secret? "Releasing that evidence to the court would violate our IP rights. You will just have to take our word for it that things look bad for the
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 wil
Really not surprising that their claims are shaky (Score:5, Insightful)
Modern Day Pirates (Score:3, Funny)
Did anyone ever patent the mail-order catalog (Score:3, Insightful)
Patents hurting the ecconomy (Score:3, Insightful)
Here is the problem. Software is already protected by copyrights the "inventions" of software are mearly an elegent solution to a problem and not the byproduct of research or hard work as much as the byproduct of a good nights sleep and waking up with a "Hay I got an idea"
Most inventions start with an idea but they end with labor and resorces. Software starts with an idea and ends with an idea only temporarly taking the form of 4 lines of code.
Then you have business method patents. The only thing more pathetic than a business protecting it's method of business as it's own intelectual property is a kid who identifys himself by a catch phrase and gets pissed when someone else uses the same combonation of words.
Back to classic inventions. The hard, fast and real devices. The lightbulb is an invention. It took research to figure out how to do it. The DC power plant is an invention. The AC power plant is annother invention. The AC power grid. Etc.
The reason for submitting a working device to the patent office is becouse the inventer had done real science. A practical aplication form of science but science never the less.
Todays true inventions are protected by trade secrets and non-discolsure agreements. Thies are far more powerful than patents.
Todays patents are much thess than great inventions but random trinketts. The patent system needs more than just an overhall. It needs a vacation.
Re:Patents hurting the ecconomy (Score:2)
While we patent thies trinkets many of them are insainly obveous and some were in the public domain.
It's just today people file simple obveous patents by doing something in the form of...
"Selling Donuts on the Internet" for example.
Nothing new or remarkably diffrent from what's already happening in the real world.
Many patents are nothing more than looking at market trends and figuring out what will come next and then patent it while some other poor slob actually makes the thing just to get
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 secre
"PanIP" hard to credit (Score:2)
Okay, I'm not really trying to say that this is a hoax or anything. It's just... the name Pangea Intellectual Properties is difficult to believe. I mean that's the kind of name the antagonist would have in a movie about IP litigation. Basically, they're saying, right there in their name,
"ALL YOUR IP ARE BELONG TO US!"
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2, Insightful)
With all the doomsday projectors and scaremongerers claiming Armageddong, if IP laws are loosened or even just gotten rid of, I just think of chicken little and sky falling story. I really, really, have hard time believing individuals and companies would somehow just stop innova
What the patents are for (Score:5, Insightful)
So next they'll be suing ATM's and cash registers.
Wonder if this covers a toaster.
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you have any idea how much money is invested in intellectual property? Either you have been living under a rock since about age five, or you are completely delusional.
Excesses like the DMCA may be corrected with future laws, but there is zero chance of ALL intellectual property laws being abolished.
This just in (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This just in (Score:2, Funny)
In former SOVIET RUSSIAN countries, all verbal contract relationships must be reversed (and yes, this includes YOU).
The abrogation of IP law means that all trade practice between initial supply and PROFIT! must be kept secret (redacted with "???" in documentation if necessary).
You don't even want to know about the hot grits and penis bird ones.
And of course, then there's SCO. Your cheque is in the mail...
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure they don't. Seems to me that the people who want all intellectual property laws abolished are the ones who have no intellectual property of their own. Why should authors, programmers, musicians, architects, graphic designers, inventors have to give up their creations into the public domain without any compensation? I agree that sometimes these lawsuits go too far and I'd also like to see copyright terms shortened instead of extended but advocating "the abolishment of all intellectual property laws" is just silly, childish, and nonsensical. That wouldn't even work in a Communist country. What is the incentive for people to create if they can't expect compensation?
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:3, Insightful)
Right, until one of your employees sells your secret code to your competitors. In a world without IP, it'd probably be pretty hard to even call this a crime.
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
and just for kicks: you can have (real)artists and research companies financed other ways than patent ransoming, it's done every day on contract and has much more sense than trying to guess where the industry is moving and patenting that. and they(research companies/artists) don't HAVE to do anything, they don't have to do research without getting paid or have to paint without getting paid(although some do, van gog
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
Before IP was recognized as, well, intellectual property, how did you sell it? We make things property to make them easier to alienate - to sell, or trade away.
Compare a trade secret with a patent - you can sell a license to use a patent to anyone and only have to worry about getting a fair price. Sell access to one of your trade secrets and you need to do everything short of DNA testing on the purc
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
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 i
Re:The Trouble With Having Rights (Score:2)
Re:The Trouble With Having Rights (Score:2)
Tell me then:
Who is going to make a career of writing games, fiction novels, or publishing music in your ideal world? Explain why and how. Remember, food and shelter are important parts of productivity.
Personally, I like an economic system where one can make a career out of those.
Re:The Trouble With Having Rights (Score:2)
My employer tried to get me to assign them IP rights to all kinds of stuff. I just refused, and refused to sign it. They never fired me. We finally came to an agreement where they own everything I do if it is, during company time, or was created on company property (computers, or in thei
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2, Insightful)
What is the incentive for people to create if they can't expect compensation?
Ok, if you argument is that without intellectual property laws there would be no creation, explain the following:
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
They shouldn't. But likewise agencies that may or may not have the best interests in the producers at heart shouldn't be allowed to apply chilling effects to stifle competition, which is what is currently happening.
Patenting software is ludicrous simply because although there are multiple ways of doing things, it all boils down to one sim
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:5, Insightful)
Me: What has intellectual property law ever done for us?
Friend: Well, there is the GPL. That's from intellectual property law.
Me: Well, obviously that. But BESIDES the GPL, what has it done?
Friend: Given artists a way to survive off of their art. I doubt we'd have as much if they had to work day jobs.
Me, Okay, well, besides GPL, and protection of artists, what has intellectual property ever done for us?
Friend: There's protection of useful inventions. Edison's lab pumped out tons of them that we still use today. That lab wouldn't have lasted if other people could have copied their ideas.
Me: Besides GPL, protection of artists, protection of useful inventions, what has IP law ever done?
Friend: Don't forget about the public access to patents that we use to make new innovations.
Me: So besides GPL, protection of artists, protection of useful inventions and public access to patents, what has IP law ever done for us?
Friend:
Me: IP LAW GO HOME!
IP LAW GO HOME!
IP LAW GO HOME!
(And on, and on, a few hundred times. Hopefully I got the conjugation right)
There is no such thing as "IP Law" (Score:2)
"Protecting artists" falls under copyright. (Though there's that "work for hire" editing theft that happened late one night in DC.)
GPL also falls under copyright.
"Encouraging inventions" falls under patent. Looking at the history of patents hasn't shown a good track record for encouraging inventions. Rather we've seen stagnation in most areas until the government or a company broke
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
Practically, companies could keep their code secret using NDAs and keeping close track of where they keep it in order to circumvent open sourcing their code if it didn't exist.
Artists don't have any God-given right to support the
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
For someone who supposedly hates copyrights, he certainly goes out of the way to point out his own. The first lines of the GPL are:
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
Now... I've done my homework... lemme see yours. So far, all I've heard is some ignornant swearing and blustering from an AC.
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
I'm still humored that you can make grandiose personal attacks and come off so high and mighty, but you can't be bothered to read what you post.
I submit to you that "revise" does not mean the same as "repeal". Someone who claims to be so smart (yet is too insecure to post non-AC) should know the difference between those words.
You have exaggerated his stance quite a bit, when his own words can't even
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
Consider that someone may see some GPL'ed code they like and wants to use it, so they do. They hire engineers and make them all sign non-disclosure agreements for all code they write, and these engineers modify it into a product they want to sell.
They sell the finished product, and keep the source under a tight lid, both legally (throu
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
Don't you mean silly hypothetical situations that would only exist if there weren't copywrite laws, which is the matter we're addressing?
Anyway, it's not really hypothetical. There are areas of IP that aren't protected by laws, such as, for example, processes for creating everything that has a particular smell or a particular taste. While this can be protected, it can't be protected well enough to
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
To make that true requires copyright law.
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
Books aren't well produced when done by the hour, or under the pressures of time or wages. They're done well when the artists want to do them. You may want to live in a world where fiction is paid for and controlled hour-by-hour by the companies that buy the books, but I don't. I get enough of that out of movies.
Want to start a company that uses that mental
Dont abolish - polish (Score:2)
Personally I would just prefer that a modicum of common sense is applied to the process (especially in the tech market).
The current PanIP style patents are a complete farce. It is the tech version of patenting slicing bread with a knife (sorry "a new method for parallel segmentation of baked goods using small angle steel alloy implements").
Q.
If there is an easy answer, you asked the wrong question...
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:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's been said over and over that good ideas are a dime a dozen (a fair wage, btw) - it's implementation that's hard. Without IP laws, companies would compete based on their ability to produce and serve. Doing that better naturally incorporates the development of new ideas. Frankly we're the sort of clever monkeys that can't *not* churn out ideas, so I have little fear that less IP law would stifle innovation. It might instead create a renewed interest in quality, which would be welcome.
Even the most breathtaking new idea isn't really new. Everything is based on the environment of ideas built from what came before. If even Isaac Newton (the egotistical snot) could admit that, surely the rest of us can take a step back from our hubris.
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 havi
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2, Insightful)
So here I go, I'm doing a shitload of work building my ecommerce site, and these clowns come along.. all they have is an idea! And they sue me, all my hard work down the toilet.
I don't support abolishing all so-called intellectual property laws, but if someone came along and offered to severely limit copyright laws, and completely ban software and business method patents, I would vote for it in an instant.
I don't want my hard work undermined by someone who has nothing but an idea (and lawyers).
Fun
Well then boot out "process" patents (Score:3, Insightful)
The patent system has been broken for a long time. Patents stagnated the development of US airplanes until the government stepped in to break the log jam.
Most of your examples were copyrights and not patents. This is important as
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:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
I think abolishing software patents is a necessity. It's just math.
Just because you want to do something that's not been done before you think you deserve an artificial monopoly on that particular widget? That's what copyright's for!
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
It's hardly a coincidence that of major "intellectual property" related tools (patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets), patents are the ones most commonly considered problematic. The second one in the list, copyrights, are mostly frowned upon because
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
Re:Donated even though I don't do ecommerce. (Score:2)
Re:My planned patents (Score:3)
I suggest simply writing a perl script to print off every previous patent with the footer "utilizing the internet" added.