A Simple Plan To Defeat Dumb Patents 234
Steve Jones writes "With the EU being rumored to look at software patents again I thought I'd have a look at the root of the problem — the US Patent Office — and work out if there is a simple way to defeat dumb patents. The big thing that defeats a patent is prior art. At the Patent Office they have the definition of Prior Art that includes the phrase: 'known or used by others in this country, or was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country.' Now suppose that every time we have an idea that we think is 'obvious' but that hasn't been done before, or something we think would be interesting but don't have the money to create — that we blogged about that idea, tagging it as 'prior art' via Technorati. This would give people an RSS feed of prior art." Read on for more details of Steve's proposal.
My argument is that by doing this we can, rightly, claim that the ideas have been described in the 21st-century version of a printed publication. Even if that is challenged, it is undeniable that by using the RSS feed it can be proven that people in a given country could have "known" about it.
I'm fed up thinking "Bloody hell I did that ten years ago," or "I thought about doing that, its a bit obvious" — when companies with as little intention as I had in developing the idea start putting the squeeze on businesses and developers. What I've always lacked is the visible proof to submit against a claim. This is a simple suggestion about using the power of the Web to create a massive prior art database. IANAL, but could it be this simple?
Would never work (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, in RETROSPECT, many of these crazy patents are obvious. But how could you possibly begin to catalog every obvious idea, technique, innovation, or invention?
This is not to mention the practical problems with this website. Who is going to pay for all the lawyers you need after the site becomes embroiled in about 1,000 lawsuits? Who is going to determine WHICH art is truly "prior" when users start fighting over who "did it first"? How are you going to deal with griefers and hucksters who spam the site with stuff like "A technique by which ink is applied to paper using an ink-filled tube" (or, God forbid, try to claim their own patent on obvious stuff by using the site as evidence).
Re:Would never work (Score:4, Insightful)
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Do you spend the time and effort indexing things like:
2031 Previously undiscovered variations on the cheeseburger
My list of favorite beers
My first novel (full text)
The best algorithm for making my wife orgasm
etc...
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I think too much spam and trolls would preclude it from ever being considered as "published" or have much respectability by the patent office. It could become just a bunch of male enhancement ads. It could also just become a huge adwords-type project where every search term returned a bunch of focused advertising.
I also used an example of a novel, which cannot be patented to begin with. Some people will confuse copyrights, patents, and trademarks. (I don't kn
Re:Would never work (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Would never work (Score:5, Interesting)
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Just let the FSF do it (Score:3, Insightful)
Just let the FSF do it. They might not even need to have ads. Of course someone will need to filter out all the spam.
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Re:Would never work (Score:4, Interesting)
It would take a lot of time, effort, and money to make the website something worthwhile.
Eh, A talented web developer could setup a useful site in a weekend or two. To make it good would take a few months longer. It's not like we're talking about something extraordinarily complex here, just a site to post ideas that has a few fields to enter keywords, categories, and free text. Then make it searchable.
It wouldn't take any money to speak of, and it's even in the best interest of software developers, so there's motivation to do so. Hell, it's even in the best interests of large software companies as it takes some burden off them for obvious software patents. The only people it's NOT in the best interest of is scumbag IP companies who don't produce anything but lawyers who sue other companies who actually DO produce things.
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alt.patent.reform.bork.bork.bork
or, more seriously
misc.int-property
alt.inventors
Re:Would never work (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way that the present proposal would offer any benefit beyond a random web search for prior art (which you can do nowadays if you really want to invalidate a patent) would be to have a system that was organized and exhaustive. It would have to be very well organized and categorized, and people would have to actively watch what companies are doing, and preemptively writing long discussions about "obvious solutions" to potential problems. These entries would have to be analyzed by others, and refined in some way. Spam and bogus entries would have to be trimmed.
Ideally, a community of volunteers would watch patents as they are granted (or applied for) and would do their own research, amassing links to prior art that exists elsewhere. This data would then be easily available to anyone who wanted to challenge the patent. By lowering the barrier to challenging software patents, such a system could conceivably reduce the number of frivolous patents.
However, ultimately to be useful it will require considerable work from alot of volunteers. Merely tagging random blog entries with "prior art" isn't useful--everything you do is prior art for a sufficiently stupid patent claim. So every single page on the internet is "prior art" for something... the tough part is organizing this all so that when you are challenging a particular claim, you can quickly find the prior art that is relevant (and so that you can, with some authority, prove that the prior art existed before a given date).
A useful volunteer-based anti-patent website is not impossible. Wikipedia proves that you can organize volunteers to generate something useful. A wiki format, for instance, would also inherently maintain histories and dates, making prior-art claims more heavily documented. But such a community will require significant effort by many people. Unfortunately, it stops becoming "a simple plan."
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Which still might not work. If 'obvious solution x' is blogged on (say) July 5th, 2007, but the company applying for the patent can show they were working on the solutin on (say) July 4th, 2007 - it's not clearly prior art.
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So when we're all force to bend over and take it from Big Corp. Inc. at least we have an RSS feed to make us feel better?
:-P
monk.e.boy
I agree that it isn't practical. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because of this, I believe it is impossible for all prior art to be located or described in a publicly-accessible manner, and I suspect most prior art is actually hidden from public view in a large subset of software application areas.
Have you ever read a blog? (Score:2)
The problem with this is that the vast majority of prior art is so obvious that no one would think of cataloging it beforehand.
People blog about the most mundane things. They post pictures about their dog, and how cute he was when he snuggled up with the cat. Someone blogging about a boring, obvious idea is at least 10 times more interesting than that.
You might not blog about something you considering boring or obvious, and I doubt I would either.. but then I also wouldn't blog about my dog and cat snugg
And even then... (Score:2)
What I would suggest is that before a patent lawsuit can be initiated, the holder of the patent must pay for a more detailed patent review. At the initiation of that review process, they would be required to give notice to any organizations they felt might be infringing on their patent. Those potential infringers would be g
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The view through the rear-view mirror is always twenty-twenty.
If an invention becomes obvious only in retrospect then - just maybe - it wasn't so obvious at all. 1-click shopping is simply an idea. Amazon has a system that works.
Not quite enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Otherwise, you have prior art that could *potentially* be used to ust a patent, but that involves getting tied up in litigation which very few independent developers can afford.
There are already avenues to have prior art published (called 'technical disclosures'), some have more chances than others of being seen by examiners.
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Indeed.
I think it is also compounded by the fact that, in my limited experience of filing a few patents, the USPTO only appears to search existing US patents when looking for prior art. The European patent offices, OTOH, also include scientific journals, etc, so tend to be more thorough.
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I can tell you that it also searches foreign patents, from personal experience.
In my experience of searching for prior art ... (Score:5, Informative)
We searched online databases of UK, EPO, WO, US, JP (Japanese, translated abstracts and later JPO provided [machine] translations), DE (German), FR (French) patents as a matter of course. It was down to the examiner to determine the scope of search to perform. We could also search hundreds of databases of technical disclosures (eg IBM's TDB - technical disclosure bulletins). All UK examiners had to be able to translate enough french and german language to be able to decide if a full translation was needed and we had other language translators to hand - JP docs were obviously important in computer fields.
Other databases included Elsevier journal databases and also paper files (go back 100 years or so) of all UK patents (which were phased out during my time there). In some areas we had libraries of other books and journals. Also if you could put a case for getting a particular publication you could get it - New Scientist and Nature were particularly popular!
One of the vital tools for prior art searches was the different "classification keys" - UKC, ECLA, USC
I also did quite a bit of internet searching (too much) using several search engines as well as site searches and a few company databases that we had access too. The problem with internet citations was proving the publication date, vital to show something is prior art.
In G06F (which is roughly G4A in the UKC, http://www.ipo.gov.uk/patent/p-decisionmaking/p-cl ass/p-class-ukc/p-class-ukc-g.htm [ipo.gov.uk]) one tended to have about 1.5 days to do a search (sometimes it would be half a day, sometimes 5). In other less strenuous fields a lot less. This means possible a few hundred abstracts to read and digest to whittle down to maybe a dozen docs to read in full and then perhaps cite 3 or 4, depending what you find. Sometimes with searches that don't fit keywords well you'd read more abstracts. Sometimes you can find an exact hit in a few minutes and spend the rest of the time finding docs to cite that will preempt what the patent attorney will try to amend the claims to.
There's no lack of places to look for prior art.
Oftentimes you'd search and search because something seemed so obvious but wouldn't find a strong citation. The problem with obviousness objections is always that the patent agent (aka attorney) can comeback and say if it was so obvious why was no one been doing it (or documented it), show me some evidence. This is especially strong in a well worked field - why did so many people overlook this obvious step. Combinations of docs suffer from ex-post facto analysis - one has to try and work from the prior position and see if the notional skilled man in the art would put those docs together?
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In response to the parent there's a requirement for US applicants to cite known US patents (and I think other prior art) that is particularly pertinent to their applications (I don't know the specific requirement). If they fail to cite something and it's proven they knew about it and it's relevant they can lose their patent (or at least be sued for big bucks). All major WO patent granting offices have to search at least a certain amount of literature - specific ranges of specific fields of patents; the US is such an office.
As an examiner I found US searches to usua
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However, you may not want the examiner to be able to see all prior art. As Don Marti pointed out [linuxworld.com], that would just allow patent troll companies to design more cleverly worded patents that get around the prior art but are still able to cause damage - and indeed are more difficult to inva
Problem?? What Problem?? (Score:3)
USPTO has no accountability for the quality of its patents and is a nice little money-spinner for Uncle Sam. Making it semi-easy to get a patent makes more people apply wich generates more money. Make it harder and less people apply.
The patent lawyers love the current system. Lots of people applying for
Can't ever be fixed (Score:2)
Also define good/bad/obvious/etc. They are all subjective
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Much like the USPS, the patent office is a money-maker for the federal government. Their fees more than offset their expenses.
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It also had the advantage of increasing costs, but only for those who were not planning on developing an actual product. Those actually planning a real product would have to incur those costs anyway. So it made life harder for paten
Patent fodder (Score:5, Insightful)
Dan East
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United States Patent Application
A Method For Using RSS Feeds as a Source for Obvious Ideas to Patent
Inventors: Anonymous P. Coward (Internets, U.S.)
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Too late! (Score:5, Funny)
How abou Wikipatent.org? Or Yahoo Patent Answers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I don't think we can record all the blindingly obvious stuff we think of, mainly because it's blindingly obvious. Or very often, we can think of salient prior art that would probably invalidate any patent claims, so we assume it's not worth mentioning.
I would rather see the patent process made a little more transparent: any patent application has to go through 90 days on a public wiki or discussion board, where we could view applications and immediately reference prior art. This might simplify the job of the patent reviewers, who cannot possibly know the history of entire industries. They could simply check out the claims of prior art (which themselves could be ranked by visitors for validity -- "oh ya, I remember THAT") and immediately see that, duh, one-click purchasing is a really dumb idea.
Why would anyone participate? First, it's in our nature. You might have heard of Slashdot, where people with varying kinds of brain matter make varying kinds of comments about varying kinds of "news." But second and more importantly, it would be protection. If you work in a business that would be affected by a one-click patent, you have incentive to make sure nobody can charge you for it, or sue you for using it, if it isn't really an original idea.
Today's patent process in the U.S. is slightly public, I know, but how about making it totally Web 2.0 and buzzword-compliant?
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Where everybody thinks they are legal expert AND a quantum physicist, and where there is a lot of noise to filter out. And where many people think that a fair number of the moderations are wrong (or even absurd) and think the moderation system itself kinda sucks (how 'bout only giving one negative mod point, for example.)
I think the idea does have merit, but
Re:How abou Wikipatent.org? Or Yahoo Patent Answer (Score:2)
This fails because it would be overwhelmed by trolls, shills, astroturfers and spammers.
Large companies would camp on the site just to disrupt any patent which might affect their business.
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I clearly want to prove that this is an obvious idea so I try and submit prior art for any previous working fusion reactors. Failing to find any, I then try and invalidate the patent in terms of how it is not physically possible. Lets assume i also fail in that.
No matter how much fuss I generate, if i can't find prior art, or demonstrate how it is obvious, or prove it is impossible, then they will
Re:How abou Wikipatent.org? Or Yahoo Patent Answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Better yet, why not make it mandatory for the party applying for the patent to check it? Since a patent application is supposed to be some sort of legal document ("I certify that we originated this novel idea, and am not aware of prior art..."), then this could be a chance for the applying party to withdraw their patent (admit that there is prior art). If a party doesn't withdraw their patent, and the patent is thereafter rejected on the basis of the prior art evidence from the site, then the applying party must pay a fine (or forfeit a deposit they made, or whatever).
Until we make it financially painful for companies to file bogus patents, they will continue to do so. The system you describe seems like the perfect way to warn a patent applicant that there is prior art. If they pursue their claim despite that knowledge, then they are breaking the law and should, at a minimum, be fined. (A harsher system would might also prevent them from applying for other patents for some time period, or perhaps even bring charges against the persons making the claims, or threaten disbarment for any lawyer who signs off on fraudulent claims.)
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PatentDot, once again. (Score:2)
I would rather see the patent process made a little more transparent: any patent application has to go through 90 days on a public wiki or discussion board, where we could view applications and immediately reference prior art. This might simplify the job of the patent reviewers, who cannot possibly know the history of entire industries. They could simply check out the claims of prior art (which themselves could be ranked by visitors for validity -- "oh ya, I remember THAT") and immediately see that, duh, one-click purchasing is a really dumb idea.
Why would anyone participate? First, it's in our nature. You might have heard of Slashdot, where people with varying kinds of brain matter make varying kinds of comments about varying kinds of "news."
Prior Art: :) I posted on this idea back in Feb of 2006: PatentDot - [slashdot.org] http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177904&cid =14756447 [slashdot.org]
Also, the PTO (later) made a suggestion along these same lines: PTO Seeks Public Input on Patent Applications [slashdot.org]
Also, ChrisGilliard (913445) [slashdot.org] Suggested using the new SlashDot tagging system [slashdot.org] which I think holds promise, too.
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Darn, I was just on my way to patent my idea, too!
:-)
Blogs are "printed publications"? (Score:3, Informative)
A pretty good idea, but will the patent office see it that way?
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Which gives me another idea...What if a "printed publication" was devised with limited printed circulation and extensive online publication. The whole idea would be to make ideas unpatentable via publication. Folks cou
Ummm.... (Score:3, Informative)
"I thought about doing that, its a bit obvious" isn't prior art, even if it were spelled correctly.
Prior Art Irony (Score:5, Informative)
Semantic Sticking Points (Score:4, Funny)
> Now to me it seems that a blog post can be classified in this day and age as the modern equivalent of a "printed publication"
Ah, a J.D. in the old "It Seems To Me" School of Legal Theory. Let me know how that works out for you.
Here is the most easy way to defeat "dumb patents" (Score:4, Interesting)
Would work also for RIAA abuse.
Now that would save alot of time and money
Re:Here is the most easy way to defeat "dumb paten (Score:3, Interesting)
Public Education (Score:3, Insightful)
Since these institutions are publicly funded, and that prior art puts the inventions in the public domain, the public's interest in running that process is obvious.
Better do it before some quack patents it.
Dumb Parents (Score:3, Funny)
Peer to Patent Project (Score:5, Informative)
Already done (Score:4, Informative)
The company where I work encourages everyone to submit patents whenever possible to the local patent layer. If it's deemed that the idea isn't really worth the effort to pursue a patent you're asked to write an article about it to be posted at a site that's specifically designed for some of the purposes mentioned in this story.
Another good idea (Score:2, Funny)
Seriously, the patent system in the US is broken and I don't think this would help. It, as was previously mentioned, would end up being abused by the patent trolls.
Any patents, not just "dumb" patents (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with your idea is that it helps the patent examiner, thereby reducing the ratio of dumb:smart patents. This lowers the cost of obtaining a patent. What we need is some sort of hash: if you have an "obvious" idea, you publish in such a way that it cannot be searched for easily until the patent has been granted (i.e. publish, but don't index) - thus the patent can be overthrown easily, but the patent office remains overwhelmed, inefficient, and expensive.
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You've got the cart before the horse, there. Of course no patent ever spurred innovation. It isn't the patent themselves that do that, it's the promise that you will be given ample opportunity to profit from the idea that spurs innovation.
Look at it this way: If you make a new widget that quickly fruzzles gumplestongs, but the idea is easy to replicate, you can pretty much bet that you'll not get your R&D costs back and thus will never make money from having i
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There's an anecdote from a local (to me) innovation and manufact
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If you don't have that capital you probably don't have the money to defend the patent against large corporations who would do exactly the same. Good patent lawyers always advise that if you can't afford to defend the patent, don't patent it.
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"Good patent lawyers always advise that if you can't afford to defend the patent, don't patent it."
What kind of a standard is that? Wouldn't a good patent lawyer give you advice based on the merits and potential value of the idea itself? I would find a reality which conforms to your statement to be absolutely infuriating, as it would basically preclude all but corporations and wealthy individual
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This is not what's needed (Score:4, Informative)
Weeding out the shakey ones doesn't get us very far. It leaves us still restricted, and it leaves the patent holders in a less shakey position.
Here's how patents work: MS thinks of an arbitrary way to do X, and then they patent 20 techniques related to this arbitrary technology. In this situation, there is rarely any prior art since the technique that MS is using isn't necessarily very smart - they could have chosen it simply because no one else does anything similar/compatible.
Peer Review (Score:3, Interesting)
(IANAL so I have no idea if all or any of this is already the case)
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Unfortunately for us, the government's definition of "public" is "prominently displayed in a locked file cabinet in an unlit basement in a disused lavatory labeled 'Beware of the Tiger'"...
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What the hell are you talking about? The very idea behind a patent is that a party can have an idea and has time to develop it and take it to market before everyone gets wind of it. In the mean time, the patent filing process happens in parallel so that others cannot use the idea for a period afte
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That's an insane solution - granting patents would then become like trying to get permits and plans approved for a major development or construction project, you'd have to answer every nutjob (and potential competitor trying to shoot you down) with time on their hands or an axe to grind. Progress
The real reason for the software patent problem (Score:2)
Like spam, it's a problem of economics. Technical fixes will not work.
The core problem is that patent offices are paid when they issue patents. They are not paid when they deny patents. Therefore, it is in their interest to issue as many stupid patents as they can get away with.
In addition, even if the patent isn't totally stupid, looking for prior art is a cost center. The more time they spend looki
Not quite (Score:2)
If someone else thought of the dumb idea before you, even if you didn't know about it, you publishing it won't prevent them from patenting it. Obviously -- one purpose of patent laws is to get inventors to disclose their inventions to
This is ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
I had an idea. I (effectively) blogged it. And if someone else comes up with it, and makes a working prototype, no sane person should argue that my blog should keep them from earning a patent.
Every patent is an obvious idea in retrospect. In reverse, it's also true that the idea of most patents was obvious beforehand: there were undoubtedly many people who thought that making an electrical device which produces light would be a great idea before Edison came along. The devil is in the details, and what matters is implementation. The standard of patents is that the process they describe should be sufficiently unique and innovative that an expert of the field would not conceive doing it that way prior to being introduced to the patented process; that's the logic that underlies the decision behind the Seldon patent decision [wikipedia.org].
Simply jotting down ideas doesn't address this issue at all. Even outlining the method doesn't really help, since the patent applicant could easily argue that while it might have seemed like an obvious approach, there were non-trivial technical issues that would arise in trying to implement that approach that their process addresses; the fact that the blogger would neither have mentioned those issues, nor built a working prototype, could reasonably be seen to support the applicant. The amount of effort that would need to go into each blog to actually make it worthwhile would basically boil down to implenting the idea, and that's far beyond what I suspect either the author wishes to suggest, or what any blogger would be willing to invest.
The problems with the patent process are well-established: an overburdened reviewing agency, combined with a fundamental issue regarding the appropriateness of patents on concepts rather than physical entities. I don't see how creating an unmoderated repository of random ideas solves either problem.
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Reminds me of an episode from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" where somebody comes around in the Manhattan Project looking for patentable ideas involving nuclear energy. Feynman says "what a ridiculous idea" and rattles off
another reason it can't work: dates (Score:2)
the PTO needs to change (Score:4, Informative)
Thankfully, the USPTO has begun a trial run of a new PEER-TO-PATENT system, as proposed by New York Law School Professor Beth Simone Noveck http://www.nyls.edu/pages/591.asp [nyls.edu] in Peer to Patent: Collective Intelligence and Intellectual Property Reform, which can be found at 20 Harvard Journal of Law Technology 123 (2006) for those of you who want some interesting reading--especially about how ridiculous each PTO examiner's workload is. The PEER-TO-PATENT Project http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/ [nyls.edu] between the PTO and NYLS will solve some of the issues with prior art (and obviousness, hopefully), but it'll likely be years before we start seeing any real progress on this front.
For the most egregious software patents, we will still *sigh* have to rely on private litigation for invalidation, but recent Supreme Court decisions (Ebay, MedImmune, Teleflex) may have made that process a little easier as well.
half baked (Score:5, Informative)
Warning: One can waste whole hours of one's life at a time on that site.
Premise is Fatally Flawed (Score:2)
But that's not addressing a couple of core issues:
1. The obvious can be patented. This must be abolished for a much narrower definition.
2. Patent Office as a revenue generator. One of the problems with treating government institutions like businesses is that the whatever good service intentions an institution starts out with diminish over time to arrive at a point where
Another Way (Score:2)
Also, patent examiners need to be paid at least as much for the applications they reject as for the ones they approve.
That's a half-baked idea. (Score:2)
Searches (Score:2)
Carmacks Reverse (Score:4, Informative)
make economic sense in most situations. For even if
you win, you have to pay your attorneys fees yourself
(often several $100,000). Also, the process can take
several years.
Therefore even patents with solid prior art don't get
invalidated most of the time. If you don't believe me,
look up "Carmacks Reverse". The algorithm was patented
by Creative _after_ John Carmack presented it on a
conferece. Creative even threatened John's company
because they are using the algorithm he had invented.
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Hmm... your history doesn't match up with Wikipedia's, read the last paragraph or two of the section of Depth fail. If you can cite sources for the version you present, that might be of interest in updating. I don't have an interest either way, but I dislike patents as currently implemented. Thus any abuses of them are of interest to me.
The Wikipedia article leads me to believe that Creative didn't do anything wrong in terms of current legal
Idea blogs (Score:2)
prior art is fine, its patent def'n thats wrong (Score:2)
if nobody is given the problem (Score:2)
If something is obvious then many people, when given the same problem, will come up with the obvious solution.
But if nobody is given the problem, then there is no reason for them to come up with the solution.
So, the patent system is a race to find problems to solve. Not a race to find a solution to a known problem.
Do not waste resources (Score:2)
I would think that it would be more effective to fight dumb patent legislation where it comes from: legislation. Invest the time and effort to organize yourselves, to put pressure on your MPs, to form groups withing universities and even better, companies that make their official statement heard.
The sad si
Never a Problem with Finding Prior Art (Score:4, Interesting)
In many cases, there is never a problem finding prior art. Most software patents would never survive in court. The problem is that no company, working in their rational self-interest, would take the time, expense, and risk of a court case. It's cheaper to either take a settlement or fire back with their own patent warchest (resulting in stalemate).
Because legally, it's meaningless (Score:2)
But I have spent years keeping lab notebooks in academia and industry. And the lawyers everywhere I've worked have always walked me through the process of documenting that notebook, dating each page, never deleting anything, only crossing it out, making copies (lab notebooks used to come with a sheet of carbon and every other page was for duplicates), and having pages you were particularly interested in witnessed and notarized. Otherwise you could spend years in court trying to prove tha
Never read a slashdot title before coffee (Score:2)
Already have this (Score:2)
It Wouldn't Get Done (Score:2)
Then all those great ideas, or at least many of them, would never get done at all because nobody could make money out of it? How many of your great thoughts that you can't pursue yourself do you want to see spiked for everyone?
This is as bad as patent trolling (Score:2)
Searching problems (Score:3, Interesting)
- Singular-value decomposition
- SVD
- Spectral decomposition
- Principal component analysis
- PCA
- Eigen analysis
- eigenimage analysis
- Karhunen-Loeve transform
- KL transform
This is further complicated by the fact that inventors are not always up on the literature and may not know the proper names for things.This isn't an insurmountable problem, but it's a big one even when searching among existing U.S. patents.
evolution will sort it out (Score:4, Interesting)
Other countries have different ways of encouraging innovation, and in the long term, their economies may dwarf ours due to our failing system.
All property rights, be they Intellectual or Physical property, exist to encourage investment. No one "naturally" owns anything, though many people have been brainwashed into thinking that is the case.
I don't know which way is best. It seems the Stalinist system doesn't work well, and the US system has some SERIOUS problems which require periodic correction (trust-busting and such).
My advice: Watch the world economies, and don't be afraid to immigrate if you see one system collapsing and another rising. Of course, you should avoid contributing to economies in countries which deny fundamental human rights (China, Iran, etc.) but don't let nationalism blind you to economic realities.
WhyNot.net (done a coupleof years ago) (Score:2)
*shrugs*
- Saj
Sorry... (Score:2)
My first idea post (Score:3, Interesting)
I won't disclose how long ago I thought of this, but in the many years since I have not ever seen it done anywhere. So either it's a new idea, or it really doesn't work, or I just haven't looked around enough.
My idea is a simple syncronous motor without a controller that will run at double speed (6000 RPM at 50 Hz, 7200 RPM at 60 Hz). The idea is to construct the stator with 3-phase windings just like a normal syncronous motor. However, for the rotor, replace the permanent magnets with 3-phase windings powered by AC current coupled to the rotor through 4 slip rings. Wire the rotor windings so the rotating magnetic field turns in the opposite direction of the intended rotation and the stator field rotation. For proper startup, use 12 distinct windings organized as 6 pairs at opposite sides. Half of the windings will be wired to line-to-neutral power connections and the other half will be wired for 1.732 times the voltage and wired to line-to-line power connections. This should give a reasonably uniform magnetic field.
Now, how do I get this tagged?
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And the fair value is a concept very difficult to define like you said
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Such a viewpoint looks extreme, when you just state it like you do. But I think you are right that the patent system needs to be abolished.
Originally I was just against software patents. But as I started studying patents in other areas, I realized that there are major problems in all patentable areas. It took me about 7 years to get from "software patents should be abolished" to "all patents should be abolished".
There are great differences in why patents should be abolished, according to the area of pa