Microsoft Word Patent Case Going To Supreme Court 207
jfruhlinger writes "Microsoft may have had to change Word after being found guilty of violating a Canadian company's patents, but it's still resisting paying for damages — and is taking the fight to the US Supreme Court. If you can't stand either MS or patents, who do you root for here?"
You root for the lawyers (Score:3, Interesting)
If you can't stand either MS or patents, who do you root for here?"
The only side certain to win this.
You can hope the patent and patents like it get invalidated, by the way. The patent can get invalidated with Microsoft still being liable.
There are outcomes that satisfy anyone, unless you hate lawyers and multi-million dollar settlements with big corporations too, in which case, you are boned.
Re: (Score:2)
If you can't stand either MS or patents, who do you root for here?"
The only side certain to win this.
The lawyers?
Re: (Score:2)
The only side certain to win -- the lawyers. They're getting very well paid, on both sides of the case.
Well, duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
You root for Microsoft, of course. If you don't like Microsoft, you can choose not to use their software. But everyone is affected by the ridiculous state of the patent system right now. I'm not optimistic that the Supreme Court can/will restore any sanity, but it's a much bigger problem than any one company.
Re: (Score:3)
Here here.
MS is many things, but the enemy of a patent troll is.... useful.
It says something when The Apache Foundation sides with you. God forbid you code a way to edit XML!
Re: (Score:2)
I completely agree. I hope Microsoft wins on this point, because it will make the patent system slightly more sane. More bad patents will be overturned. (I should mention that it is "hear, hear", not "here here", by the way).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They have made various threats against Linux, but have not taken any direct action...
For MS, the threat of patents does guaranteed damage at no risk/cost to them... If they filed a suit then it might result in their patents getting invalidated or for it to be found that Linux does not violate them, thus leaving them with nothing.
Other companies have pledged their patents to a defensive-only pool, that is anyone can use those patents freely providing they don't file a patent lawsuit against any of the pool m
Re: (Score:2)
Making threats is an action. It's like telling someone not to move or you'll pull the trigger. And in the case of Microsoft's high paid lawyers, it would be relevant to their threat. They could kill off a company fairly easily. Your words control their actions, so it is therefore an action.
In most cases, people will try to avoid the gunfight so you get a bunch of people standing around pointing guns at each others head with no real work getting done. (Except in this case, someone is still putting money
Re:Well, duh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really. If Microsoft keep winning their patent suits then from their point of view the patent system is hunky dory and they will continue supporting it and using it themselves, to stifle their competition. If Microsoft lose and it hurts enough, then it might force them to rethink their patent strategy. If the US software patent system hurts them enough and keeps hurting them, they might start lobbying to change it.
Re: (Score:2)
I hope Microsoft loses, but only because I hope that if they keep losing to patent trolls like this, they will eventually realize that the system is horribly broken and will back up the movement to fix it.
The more other big players lose to patent trolls, the sooner everyone will realize that the patent system itself is the problem.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
oh no, this is one of those rare cases where MS is well out of order. They blatently stole the technology developed by i4i, and although I too hate software patents and patent trolls, this time the company is (well, was, until MS destroyed their legit business) in the right.
That they sell nothing now doesn't mean they weren't a good, small startup company once.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
they didn't partner with MS, their tech was bought by Homeland security to help filter documents relating to potential terrorists, MS saw what the tech did and suddenly.. the next version of Word came out with exactly the same technology in it. The original judge awarded them $40m for 'intentional patent infringement'.
According to the court: In court documents, Judge Leonard Davis revealed a "particularly damaging" Microsoft internal e-mail that not only acknowledged i4i's patent (No. 5,787,449), but listed
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Depends how much you need to pay for the privilege. If the costs of patent litigation get passed on to the consumer, and if patent trolling continues to escalate, then building your own could become worth many people's time.
But in fact, it's not an either/or proposition. Most local independant computer shops I've come across offer their own brand hand-built computers for sale. If the scenario proposed came to pass, I'd guess a lot of th
Re: (Score:2)
Small shops like windows...
Its many and frequent difficult to fix problem bring customers back for service.
The lack of a built in repository and very few/useless bundled apps, combined with the dangers of downloading random files brings users back to buy more software.
Give those customers a ubuntu box which has a simple app-store like method of adding additional software and a very low likelihood of malware infection and most of those users won't be back to the store to spend more money.
Re: (Score:2)
The crapware comes off the price of the total package tho... There is nothing to stop crapware makers producing similar crap for linux and doing the same thing.
You are not comparing like for like...
A system with a clean crapware free install of windows would always cost more than a clean crapware free install of linux.
Buying servers is a better example because its far less common for crapware to be bundled on server systems, and most server vendors provide linux and no software options on their servers.
I th
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft are not aiming to invalidate software patents tho, they just want to invalidate this one patent. They want to wield patents against others in the same way i4i is doing against them. They want to make patent suits so expensive that small players like i4i can't do it, while microsoft can bully whoever they want.... This is very bad for everyone else.
Who to root for? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just be satisfied that each has to deal with the other.
Emotions (Score:5, Insightful)
"Which position do your biased emotions tell you to take?"
Re: (Score:2)
LOL. Good one.
A better discussion, however, would be one that relates to the specific issues before the court (i.e., the basis of the appeal, rather than the results of a Slashdot popularity poll). From the Wall Street Journal [wsj.com]:
Re: (Score:2)
Silly troll. Double entendre only works if the target audience understands the second meaning.
Aus:Root, US:Screw, UK:Shag
Re: (Score:2)
Shag? Girlfriend!? I still don't get it...
Who do you root for ? You hope that BOTH lose. (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe the Supremes will cite Bliniski.... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Unlikely, for two reasons.
First, this isn't the question that SCOTUS was asked to decide. They were asked to determine whether the "clear and convincing" burden of proof is the appropriate standard when a court is determining whether an issued patent is invalid, in those cases where there is evidence that the USPTO was not able to consider during prosecution. The court will generally limit itself only to answering those controversies specifically brought before it.
Second, the whole point of the Bilski v.
Sue the patent office (Score:2, Interesting)
It is time to sue the patent office, not the patent holders:
The question the Supreme Court must answer is "What burden of proof is required to invalidate a patent?" The difficulty is that the *legal* answer may not match the *real world* answer. In theory, it should require a high burden of proof because the patent office already examined the patent application, determined it was patentable, searched for prior art, etc. But in reality, the patent office isn't doing that. I wish I could find the public s
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I wish I could find the public statement where they basically said it isn't their responsibility to search for prior art.
My guess is that you're making an oblique, and somewhat confused, reference to the rules that were never implemented as a result of the Tafas v. Doll lawsuit, where some folks actually did sue the USPTO. Among other things, the rules would have required the applicant to perform a search and submit the results in cases where more than 5 independent and/or 25 total claims are filed. Since the USPTO lost the lawsuit, the rules were never implemented. Note that even if the rule had been implemented, it would
MS is in the wrong here. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Any competently designed binary representation of XML (either in memory or on disk) will infringe on their patent.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MS is in the wrong here. (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.google.com/patents?id=y8UkAAAAEBAJ&printsec=description&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false [google.com]
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION It is an object of the present invention to provide an improved method of encoding a document It is a further object of the present invention to provide an improved system of encoding a document. Thus, in sharp contrast to the prior art the present invention is based on the practice of separating encoding conventions from the content of a document. The invention does not use embedded metacoding to differentiate the content of the document, but rather, the metacodes of the document are separated from the content and held in distinct storage in a structure called a metacode map. whereas document content is held in a mapped content area. Raw content is an extreme example of mapped content wherein the latter is totally unstructured and has no embedded metacodes in the data stream.
What they have done is taken the prior existing technology XML, and patented using it in a document to describe how some text is bold, or what the document title is. Fuck that, that is the most obvious use of XML, it's a textbook example of XML. These guys would never make $290 million off of their "invention" which they didn't invent.
Also, I don't believe the fact that the courts didn't invalidate the software patent indicates, by any stretch of the means, that the patent should be a valid patent. That's why everyone here generally doesn't hate patents, they just hate software patents. People patent obvious things and our courts buy it. Regardless of where you stand on the matter of if it hurts the big guy or the little guy, it is an incredible injustice to be able to patent obvious things, which many software patents actually are.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Holy shit.... Did you seriously just say that you looked at the claims, but then you quoted a chunk of text that isn't part of the claims?
Re: (Score:2)
They didn't, so it might be safe to assume this patent actually is the real thing (according to the current legal definition)
I've no doubt that hundreds of software patents are the real thing. That doesn't mean that as a class, they should be valid patents. In that context, the *best* that outcome here is that Microsoft loses -- I4I gets paid and MS has more incentive to push for patent system change. At least in theory. In reality, I suspect that any company with hundreds of millions invested in patents and associated fees will be very unlikely to want to throw that investment away.
Stone the Crows! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
+6 Sword of Microsoft (Score:2)
Seriously, if MS trashes this whole deranged patent situation they will win the true title of "Do no evil masters of 2011". If you were to compare it to other things on our tech head collective wish lists this would rank at the top with Oracle fully opening up Java, or Netw
Re: (Score:2)
Are you kidding? (Score:2)
If you can't stand either MS or patents, who do you root for here?
Whatever, that's easy. The supreme court knocks down all patent law, finding it unconstitutional, while simultaneously fining Microsoft a million billion dollars for contempt of court or something. Is this really that hard for you? The solution is so easy. You're welcome.
I'd root for the little guy (Score:2)
... but not for their sake.
If MS finds that they are losing enough from software patents, maybe they'll lobby to get them declared invalid.
who do you root for here? (Score:2)
The lawyers.
who do you root for here? It doesn't matter! (Score:2)
If Microsoft loses, we get to take joy in the loss. If Microsoft wins, we get to take joy at Microsoft for narrowing patent law to its own long-term disadvantage.
Re: (Score:2)
How will this narrow patent law? I don't think that MS is arguing against the patent system. If anything, MS is arguing against this one particular patent. Whatever the outcome, it will have no effect on the patent system, or MS's future behavior.
MS bullying does not depend on the final outcome of a court's decision. Lawsuits are so expensive that, once a company like MS sues you, you have already lost. You will eventually have to settle because the settlement is so much less than the cost of litigation.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How will this narrow patent law? I don't think that MS is arguing against the patent system. If anything, MS is arguing against this one particular patent. Whatever the outcome, it will have no effect on the patent system, or MS's future behavior.
That isn't true at all. The issue at the Supreme Court is not this particular patent. The issue is what the burden of proof should be when attempting to prove a patent invalid, particularly when an alleged infringer brings evidence not considered by the Patent Of
Who do you root for? (Score:2)
Well, you have to bet on Microsoft. Come on -- it's our Supreme Court and the biggest corporation has the most rights.
Does it even matter who wins? (Score:2)
It's not as if the patent system is on trial.
MS will continue scamming, bullying, and extorting; regardless of the outcome of this trial.
Other companies will also attack MS, but MS has the upper hand, because MS has more money.
Software patents are evil (Score:2)
Microsoft can win here but still lose at trial (Score:3, Informative)
If Microsoft is successful here, then it will be easier to invalidate questionable patents, especially when using prior art or other evidence not considered by the Patent Office. This is significant because the Patent Office often does not have the time or resources to search all possible prior art, especially art that has not been neatly cataloged and indexed for search (e.g. that ancient piece of software you remember using in the 80s that did exactly what the patent claims but isn't sold anymore).
An important feature of this case is that even if Microsoft wins at the Supreme Court level, the patent may still be found valid and infringed. If Microsoft wins and the case goes back down to the trial court, it's entirely possible that the judge will say "nope, the evidence still doesn't meet the new lower standard; pay up."
Relatedly (Score:2)
Relatedly, Harper v. Maverick Recording Co. (Docket number 10-94) [scotusblog.com], an RIAA case which concerns the innocent infringer defense, was denied cert at the same conference [scotusblog.com].
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ultimately, the whole software patent system is faulty. But currently, companies have to go by it and that means Microsoft
Re:Since Microsoft is Evil (Score:5, Informative)
This used to be true. Now Microsoft has been threatening people with patent litigation. If fact, they took the outstanding step of suing Motorola - several times! [zdnet.com]
Of course this is neither here nor there on the evilness issue. That's a story that has no beginning and no end, its purity no degree.
Re:Since Microsoft is Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
When have you seen them going after other companies if they don't provoke the legal fight first?
You mean like just last month when they sued Motorola over Android? I guess you're counting Motorola abandoning the Windows Mobile platform in favor of Android as "provoking" MS.
Re:Since Microsoft is Evil (Score:5, Informative)
SCO's fight against Linux was funded in part by Microsoft. Then there are the 235 mystery patents that Linux supposedly violated. They're more into scare tactics than outright patent war,
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft was also behind that Acacia suing Redhat.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft kind of does oppose software patents. When have you seen them going after other companies if they don't provoke the legal fight first? They have also freed their patents to open and free-to-use patents organizations. The only cases where Microsoft has used their patents portfolio to fight against patent trolls is, well, when the patent troll has started going after MS first. Ultimately, the whole software patent system is faulty. But currently, companies have to go by it and that means Microsoft has to register their patents too. Blame the system.
NO: http://eupat.ffii.org/gasnu/microsoft/index.en.html [ffii.org]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft has more to gain from the destruction of the system of software patents than anyone. Already being in the dominant position in market share, they would be free to implement any good ideas from other pieces of software, and Windows and Windows Server and Office and all their other products would be able to concentrate on features. They would save a ton of money from their legal department and could reallocate that to their development staff. With as much code as they have, I would bet they could te
Re: (Score:2)
If they had to gain they would oppose the patent system. Instead they embraced it. They likely have done assessments.
Re: (Score:2)
Technically speaking, Microsoft (and everyone else) is totally free to implement good ideas from anything they see. A patent doesn't cover an idea, it covers a very specific implementation.
Now, sure, in the real world, this may get you sued, just because companies are lawsuit-happy these days. But if your implementation is different, you should win that lawsuit. If it's not, then yeah, you're violating that patent.
Re:Since Microsoft is Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Your entire post is false and tantamount to flamebait. Destroying software patents would not allow someone to copy MS code verbatim and only change branding. That would still be covered under copyright. The abolition (or weakening) of software patents would only mean that other teams can create, from scratch, implementations of previously patented software without worrying about the fact that the patent shouldn't even exist because there exists prior art back 10 or 20 years.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not patents that prevent that today, it's copyright. It's relatively uncommon (though not rare*) that people suggest the outright dissolution of copyright (the famous example at slashdot is without copyright, there can be no GPL). The common position on slashdot -- and indeed, in many other venues -- is that copyright is far too powerful right now but that it has redeeming value.
* Usually people don't suggest the dissolution of copyright in so many words. What they argue is that because the marginal
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Setting such a high price tag would simply keep small players out of the market, the likes of disney would continue renewing the copyright on mickey mouse indefinitely...
Incidentally, i4i are not a typical patent troll, they actually have and were selling a product when MS stole the idea and integrated it into their product effectively killing i4i's market. That said, it shows that you should never trust microsoft not to screw you and i4i should have known better with all the history.
Copyrights should be mu
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind (Score:3, Insightful)
Opponents of software patents should root for Microsoft here, regardless of how you feel about the company (I loathe their philosophy but like a few of their products).
Believing in justice means believing it applies even to your enemies and opponents. Besides, we don't want the Supreme Court setting some awful pro-software-patent precedent that will haunt less-deep-pocketed open-source developers down the road.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's too many opposing principles at work here. I can only hope the entire system explodes in a big boggle, but I doubt it.
On one side, patents as implemented are wrong so MS deserves to prevail.
On the other, prevailing due to having deep pockets when someone without would lose is wrong. Justice only exists when it extends to all. If you or I would lose here, so should MS.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
And when it's all over and done, and software patents are that much further entrenched, we can point to posts like yours and say "You sure got what you wanted! Are you happy now, asshole?"
Figures that you wouldn't even have the balls to attach a pseudonym or handle to your post. Fucking wuss.
Re: (Score:2)
And when it's all over and done, and software patents are that much further entrenched, we can point to posts like yours and say "You sure got what you wanted! Are you happy now, asshole?"
Oddly, your words sound very reminiscent of a speech given in the film "A Man for all Seasons":
William Roper:So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, fr
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Where's the (-1, naïve) button??
Patented (duh!)
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
So Canadian Court says pay money
What Canadian court? Unless you for some reason think the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit [reuters.com] is actually Canadian.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
So Canadian Court says pay money, so you go above them to the US Supreme Court, aka, Court of the World?
The Company and its people are Canadian, but i4i came to the US to sue Microsoft in the US District court of Eastern Texas.
Note, this is one of those cases of true alleged evil [zdnet.com].
i4i is not a patent troll. They developed software. They showed Microsoft the software, in the hopes of Microsoft licensing it.
Microsoft reviewed the technology, apparently decided to not license it / not incorporate the technology.
The next version of Word included Microsoft's own copycat implementation of exactly the technology. And came to the market competing against i4i's product instead of properly licensing i4i's product.
IOW, this is not a bunk "obvious method" software patent. This is exactly the type of things patents are designed to prevent.
Wholesale stealing of a significant invention.
And the allegation of willful infringement appeared to be a reasonable allegation for i4i to make.
I normally go against software patents, but only because often the things that are patented are not inventions, or attempts are made to apply the patent to things simpler or more fundamental than the invention.
In this case, however, I would not object to i4i enforcing this patent and that succeeding
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
This patent is certainly less trivial than most, but like most things in computer technology it is not much of an "invention". The basic idea here is content / representation separation in document generation, something that goes back to the first automated business information systems. The idea of sticking a section like this in the middle of another document is about as exotic as the notion of include files and macros, which also go back decades prior.
In the early 1990s the idea of active content and embedded objects was all the rage. In fact Microsoft has been sued on those grounds before, by someone else who pulled out an idea that was "in the air" at the time. Not because it was an "invention", but because it was commercially practical.
Virtually every idea in computer science has been thought of decades prior, and the only reason long expired patents aren't already held on them is because the level of computing power didn't make them commercially practical at the time. These folks appear to have an excellent implementation of inline xml expansion, but it hardly ranks as an "invention" of the sort that no one would independently come up with for years to come.
And that is one of the basic problems with the patent system - give a company a twenty year monopoly on something that is at best a couple years advance on the prior art. The patent system is made for fields that experience a basic technological changeover about once a century, not fields that do that every ten years or so.
That is why the claim that they "ripped off our technology" has about as much credibility as the claim "I played a heretofore unknown chord on the piano". A minor twist on something bouncing around in the heads of computer scientists for decades prior at best.
Re: (Score:2)
Virtually every idea in computer science has been thought of decades prior
This is impossible. It is a self-referential paradox.
Let's play it out with your example:
Say the idea of sticking a section like this in the middle of a document is at time T.
Then the notion of include files and macros might be time T-20 years
So there must have been something similar at T-40 years... which was not an original idea, because it was really invented at T-80 years. But wait.. that was actually invented at T-100 years.....
Surely some other law has been broken? (Score:2)
Although I would agree that Microsoft has acted in a dishonest and unethical fashion, I'm not sure that redress should be found in the patent court. Can't they sue Microsoft on other grounds, such as breach of trust or violation of their NDA?
Re: (Score:2)
Is it me or is this case eerily similar to Stac [wikipedia.org] vs MS. In that case, Stac made disk compression software. They showed it to MS (including code) as MS wanted to license it. MS decided not to license it but releaseed MS DOS 6.0 which included their disk compression software called DoubleSpace. Fortunately for Stac, they had patented their algorithms which MS had been found to have copied.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:kneejerk rooting against microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
I can list you plenty of reasons for fighting and boycotting Microsoft. Google? You'd have to help me out there.
The only thing I'm really aware of being a problem with google is the collection of personal information. But there's a simple solution to that: don't use google/use it wisely.
For MS there is no workaround. They are and have been keeping the software industry and community back. With MS there is no choice but to fight them in every which way that is possible. It's them or us.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Google analytics is on just anout every web page. The cookie is kept forever. Most users aren't even aware of this sort of thing so "use it wisely" isn't useful advice. They keep information *forever*. They decided to completely ignore copyright and disrespect the authors opinions by indexing every book, then going behind the a
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't disagree with you at all. All I'm saying is that with google I, as a technical sort of person, have the option to avoid the problems that indeed do exist.
With MS you cannot avoid the problem. MS continues to fight progress and freedom everywhere, and it will impact everybody sooner or later. MS must be destroyed, there is no alternative.
With google it is far far from being that bad right now.
Re: (Score:2)
As a user of Google Analytics, I can honestly say "boohoo".
If you don't like it, block the cookie. Every modern browser I know of supports it, so go do it and you're done.
As for evil, Google is offering a service that every web developer wanted and/or was already doing themselves. Google simply provides an outsourced way of doing it for us. Knowing how long customers stay on pages, and which links they navigate to how often is hardly evil information.
Re: (Score:2)
The thing with a tracking cookie is that it can be deleted without affecting your enjoyment of the software you are using (page you are on)... try that with Windows/DirectX/.NET.
The analytic site can also be blocked and it doesn't cause the page to tell you your copy of some browser may be invalid and ask you to validate it by calling home while blanking your desktop.
The level of expertise involved in blocking Google is an order of difficulty less than trying to create your own Win32 API that doesn't violat
Re: (Score:2)
Is this your honest opinion or are you trolling? If it's the former I'll try to collect the relevant information for you to understand what's going on.
Before I do that though, tell me, are you perchance one of the people believing that anything is acceptable in business, no matter how immoral or even illegal?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Software patents are damaging and a barrier to entry which reduces competition. If Microsoft (which is a huge organization of people
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't slavishly follow a brand or a company and excuse it when it behaves badly or condemn it even when it does good.
Well, you're not supposed to behave that way. However, many people do exactly that. Just look at the Apple / Linux / Microsoft flamewars.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Software patents are damaging and a barrier to entry which reduces competition.
Except that, in this case, Microsoft is fighting software patents because they're actually removing a barrier to entry. Traditionally, if you were a small startup that did anything interesting and innovative - especially if it needed to interface with Microsoft products - you risked Microsoft cloning your product and driving you out of business.
Microsoft could integrate with their own products in a way no third party could and piggy-back on the fact that everyone uses Microsoft software to drive uptake rega
Re: (Score:2)
If you're going to "root" for anything, root for something practical that benefits all...A comet strikes D.C. the day of the hearing. No losers!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As regards being able to sell on patents, this is entirely right if the patent itself is right. Certainly they should have a resonable expiry period, but saying that only the person that comes up with an idea is the person who can implem
Re: (Score:2)
Software patents are no different than normal patents in that it restricts one group from solving a problem. That is what a patent does, to reward the person who solved it first for a fixed period of time.
Really, any argument you make for the physical analogy...i.e. physical patents are for specific implementations can be applied to software equivalents.
The problem is that software patents are not screened and are granted without any process...eg granting a one click purchase patent...that was not something
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Patents (and copyrights for that matter) may have started out with noble ideals, but today they are distorted to such an extent that their net effect is extremely harmful and very much evil.
Patents were supposed to encourage innovation, but today they actually impede innovation significantly. Even Bill Gates has said so.
Re: (Score:2)
Yup.
Originally patents were designed to help innovation. Rather than keeping your thing secret, you told everyone how it worked -- in return for a temporary monopoly on that thing. And by "thing" I mean "specific implementation". Something that passes a rigorous test of "obviousness to one skilled in the art", prior art (including prior art that everyone knows about but isn't covered by patents), etc.
The state of patents, particularly in the USA, is much different today. Patents are granted without proper e
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
at Burger King in favor of a WOPR rather than a Big Mac...
I am so hungry right now! And I also have a strange urge to go find an acoustic coupler for my phone and invite Ally Sheedy to my place...
But seriously, a burger would be awesome @now. Really.