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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Lindt loses German case over Easter bunny trademark | 661 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
International Space Station migrating to Linux
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 10:05 AM EDT
"We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable..." Linux Foundation Training Prepares the International Space Station for Linux Migration

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Friend of the Court: How Anthony Lewis Influenced the Justices He Covered
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 10:16 AM EDT
Anthony Lewis (March 27, 1927 – March 25, 2013) was a public intellectual and journalist, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and a longtime New York Times columnist. He is credited with creating the field of legal journalism in the United States. - Wikipedia

---

Lewis would write in a book about another aspect of constitutional law defamation that a 1919 Harvard Law Review article by Harvard Professor Zechariah Chafee about “Freedom of Speech in War Time” “may have been the best-timed law-review article ever published,” coming as it did just ahead of the great free speech opinions of Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. But Lewis’s own handiwork, published in 1958, is certainly a contender for the same title. To a remarkable degree, Lewis set the agenda, and established the arguments for all that was to follow.

And what followed was a constitutional revolution.

Richard Tofel, Pro Publica

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as “Top Priority” for 2013
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 10:39 AM EDT

FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as “Top Priority” for 2013

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Why so many Judges recuse from SCO case?
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 11:29 AM EDT
Utah’s federal court system braces for cuts

Utah’s federal court system braces for cuts

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Difficulty loading Groklaw pages
Authored by: artp on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 12:07 PM EDT
I am having a terrible time satisfying my Groklaw cravings
today. Pages often don't load fully, or don't connect at
all.

Other Web sites are variable. National Weather Service,
Techdirt and GMail work fine. Amazon is variable like
Groklaw.

Don't know if this is Groklaw-specific or if it is fallout
from the SpamHaus DDOSing. I find it terribly ironic that
spammers are not only DDOSing a spam blacklist, but that
they have a public spokesman for the whole deal. What nerve!

I suppose I should be grateful that they aren't hiring a
lawyer and trying to drive SpamHaus out of business,
although that would be a more normal approach to the
problem.

---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

OT-Groklaw Physics Geeks - The Primer Fields? Q: Anything at all to this? Fiction or Fact?
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 12:19 PM EDT
Physics related - Just was watching a series of videos about;

T he Primer Fields
at:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI8-E8k8mrZdRmXzjBeK-EQmv8wPOIY9d

The claim of this discovery is;
"In this video series the currently accepted theories of physics and astrophysics are shaken to the core by a radical new theory of the fundamental forces in all matter".

It's interesting, but is there anything to it, as claimed?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Lindt loses German case over Easter bunny trademark
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 12:29 PM EDT
Swiss premium chocolate maker Lindt & Spruengli has lost a court battle to protect its gold foil-wrapped Easter bunnies from imitation by a German rival.

Lindt, which traces its origins to a Zurich confectionery shop set up in the 1840s, has been fighting German chocolate maker Confiserie Riegelein since 2000 to try to stop it producing similar chocolate bunnies.

But Germany's Federal Court of Justice rejected a final appeal by Lindt & Spruengli on Thursday.

Emma Thomasson, Reuters

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 12:33 PM EDT
Ope n Patent Non-Assertion Pledge This is interesting. Any thoughts?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Welcome back, MW
Authored by: fredex on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 01:52 PM EDT
while I haven't been making a serious study, my recollection is that we haven't
had an article by Mark in some weeks. It's nice to see you back, Mark!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Piracy will kill the gread undustry [comic]
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 01:56 PM EDT
http://s.gullipics.com/image/e/3/z/hq2x3b-kmkmj8-j8dt/26621.png

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Does first to file hurt people that don't file? Or make it harder to get a patent?
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 02:10 PM EDT
I'm having a brain fart moment and looking for clarification..

Is the idea of the first to file system that it should be harder to get a
patent? In other words, there will be more prior art available? Or does it
mean that someone filing for a patent can extort money out of others who have
been using a particular patented technique for years before the patent was
filed?

In other words, what is the perceived benefit of F2F over F2I?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Linux Switching Week!!
Authored by: OpenSourceFTW on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 03:56 PM EDT
Now that Spring break has arrived, I am ready to get down to the business of
switching over to Linux.

I'm burning Fedora and Slackware install DVDs at this very moment.

Excited to finally put my "money" where my mouth is as a
pro-OpenSource guy.

That said, I do have to keep a small windows partition, but I'm going to see how
much I can avoid using it.

It's going to be a triple boot system, with Fedora as the primary OS, Slackware
as the experimental OS (so I can learn), and Windows 7 as the, well, other OS.

Some questions: Can I use the same swap partition for two different Linux
installs? I don't see why not, but does anybody know differently?

I also plan to have them share a /home partition. Is that a problem?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Are top VC Firms good investments?
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 04:00 PM EDT
"As venture capital firms feel the squeeze from new competitors, unsatisfied investors, and stagnant markets, two of the industry’s biggest names could finally have their performance data revealed to the public."

"A California lawsuit from the news organization Reuters is threatening to expose the performance records of Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers—Silicon Valley firms that are among the most well-known in the secretive world of VC investing." link

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

New CFAA Draft to Expand, Not Reform
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 04:37 PM EDT
The International Business Times has a story about how the Department of "Justice" is trying to expand the Computer "Fraud" and "Abuse" Act in such a way as to allow them to harass internet users with greater ease.

This is the same law that was used to harass the late Mr. Araon Swartz. Rather than admit that what they did to Mr. Swartz is wrong, they would rather change the law to make what they did the new standard operating procedure. These people have no soul.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Monsanto Protection Act ..
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 05:48 PM EDT
"The provision protects genetically modified seeds from litigation in the face of health risks and has thus been dubbed the “Monsanto Protection Act” by activists who oppose the biotech giant. President Barack Obama signed the spending bill, including the provision, into law on Tuesday" link

`The "Monsanto Protection Act" effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of controversial genetically modified (aka GMO) or genetically engineered (GE) seeds, no matter what health issues may arise concerning GMOs in the future' link

"Sec. 735. In the event that a determination of non-regulated status .. been invalidated .. the Secretary of Agriculture shall .. immediately grant temporary permit(s) .. while ensuring that growers or other users are able to move, plant, cultivate, introduce [GM CROPS] into commerce" link

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Rackspace vs. PersonalWeb Technologies
Authored by: hardmath on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 07:02 PM EDT

Note that this Uniloc lawsuit is different from the one filed in Sept. 2012 by PersonalWeb Technologies.

Googling around I did not find anything significant after the response by Rackspace as far as the progress of this other East Texas District litigation.

---
Recursion is the opprobrium of the mathists.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Media ignore the way new laws and regulations are enriching business at the expense of consumers
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 07:30 PM EDT
Journalists are missing one of the biggest stories in America: the saga of how new laws and regulations are promoting monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies, to the massive detriment of consumers.

Telling this story doesn't require serious investigative skills or sophisticated computer-assisted reporting. All you have to do is cover the nuts and bolts. Many of the most important changes are made at regulatory agencies, which generally receive scant coverage even though their decisions affect prices, the quality of goods and services, and taxes.

[...]

Journalists who want to grab readers by their wallets, who want to make their stories so valuable that people pay attention need only make one change in how they report the news: Balance business news coverage focused on the minority of people who are investors with the viewpoint of the majority of people who are customers.

David Cay Johnston, American Journalism Review

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Creeping Privatization of Justice
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 09:12 PM EDT
Lauren's and Bob's recent posts brought to mind a theme that keeps cropping up in my teaching and research: public authorities increasingly offloading responsibility for important justice-related issues, especially consumer justice, to the private sector.

On the teaching side, I teach Civil Procedure, and that world is all abuzz with talk of a slew of recent Supreme Court and Court of Appeals opinions that have prioritized private arbitration over public adjudication of disputes (see, e.g., here and here).

And this movement is afoot not only in the classic context of complex business disputes, where arbitration makes some sense; rather, it has taken hold in David-and-Goliath situations involving important rights like employment contracts and consumer sales and service contracts of a variety of kinds.

Jason Kilborn, Credit Slips

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Unique in the Crowd
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 09:44 PM EDT
Another look at the accuracy of cellphone tracking

nature.com

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The largest computer ever built
Authored by: Gringo_ on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 07:23 AM EDT

This is absolutely fascinating, and very well documented, with videos: The largest computer ever built: the "Semi-Automatic Ground Environment" or SAGE system...

Each of the 27 computers that made up the system was a dual core 32 bit CPU made of 60,000 vacuum tubes 175,000 diodes, and 12,000 of those newfangled transistors. Memory: 256k of magnetic core RAM (invented for this project) clocking in every 6 microseconds. These things weighed 300 tons, consumed 3 megawatts of electrical power and ran a blistering 75,000 operations per second. The dual cores weren’t used for multiprocessing. One was kept on hot standby in case the other failed.The SAGE system started running in 1958, and didn’t stop until 1984.

No doubt it was the sheer scale of this system that inspired science fiction of the day to speculate on fears that the machine could achieve consciousness, with devastating consequences. We would laugh today if someone suggested a machine with a core of 256k of RAM could do that, yet continue to be dazzled by machines like Watson. No doubt Watson will appear just as primitive to generations of the future.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Three reasons Microsoft wants to kill the Windows Desktop
Authored by: Gringo_ on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 07:29 AM EDT

Microsoft's Windows Blue update to Windows 8 makes it increasingly clear that Microsoft wants to kill the Desktop. That may seem self-defeating, but there's method in Microsoft's madness. Here are three reasons I think it wants to eventually kill the Desktop.

A quick and easy read, this article summarzies what I have been saying all along, only I would add: Blue, whatever that initiative involves, will be too late. Microsoft has missed the window of opportunity, and Blue will be like locking the barn door after the horses have already gone. There is no reason to believe people will want to migrate en mass to Microsoft's Metro OS.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Legal decision with literary flourish and dry wit making the rounds in Toronto legal circles
Authored by: JamesK on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 10:05 AM EDT
A 12-page decision that stems from an alleged Highway Traffic Act offence is quite the entertaining page turner.

---
The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Winnipeg judge jails juror for being late to sexual assault trial
Authored by: JamesK on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 10:17 AM EDT
A Winnipeg judge who put a tardy juror in jail for an afternoon has let her off with a warning.

---
The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The Darwin-Hooker Letters
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 10:31 PM EDT
The 1400 letters exchanged between Darwin and Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) account for around 10% of Darwin’s surviving correspondence and provide a structure within which all the other letters can be explored.

They are a connecting thread that spans forty years of Darwin’s mature working life from 1843 until his death in 1882 and bring into sharp focus every aspect of Darwin’s scientific work throughout that period. They illuminate the mutual friendships he and Hooker shared with other scientists, but they also provide a window of unparalleled intimacy into the personal lives of the two men.

http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwin-hooker-letters

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

w o r d s
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 10:53 PM EDT
Timothy Taylor Is "Intellectual Property" a Misnomer?

Maggie Koerth-Baker Do GMOs yield more food? The answer is in the semantics

Carol Goar Three distasteful buzzwords have crept into the language, confusing Canadians and stifling public debate

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Judge Denise Cote being sued by bankers lawers. Or, One Judge to rule on them all !
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, March 30 2013 @ 03:11 PM EDT
U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote took over the case in December, 2011, and quickly made a series of rulings in the case, first denying a motion by the banks to dismiss the lawsuit. The bank lawyers have become so dissatisfied with Cote’s rulings, in fact, that they have asked the Second Circuit to reverse them. The filing calls for a “writ of mandamus” that would throw out a series of rulings around discovery, which the bank lawyers claim “deprived Petitioners of their right to obtain evidence.” (You can chew for a moment on the idea that banks are being deprived of their rights.) One Judge to rule on them all

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

10,000 times faster than light
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, March 30 2013 @ 06:35 PM EDT
How fast do quantum interactions happen? Faster than light, 10,000 times faster.

That's what a team of physicists led by Juan Yin at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai found in an experiment involving entangled photons, or photons that remain intimately connected, even when separated by vast distances.They wanted to see what would happen if you tried assigning a speed to what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance."

They didn't find anything unexpected, but that wasn't the point: in physics, sometimes it's good to be sure. Jesse Emspak, NBC

10,000x light speed is about warp factor 9.9
what do photons weigh at those g-forces? would the photons create their own cavitation black holes?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Todays APOD (31/03/2013) is a must see
Authored by: Nick_UK on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 04:27 AM EDT
Oh to be an astronaut.

Earth at night

Nick

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

USPTO denies Apple's iPad Mini trademark
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 05:12 AM EDT

This story came to my attention this morning.

What is it Apple is trying to trademark? The "Mini" suffix to stop others using it, because the article says (implies) that the iPad mini was launched last November (2012), yet a year ago (April 2012 - some 6 months earlier) I changed my phone to a Samsung Galaxy Ace and my Wife changed hers (at the same time) to a Samsung "Galaxy Mini" - a smaller version of the "Galaxy" phone.

Are Apple just copying (surely NOT, Apple NEVER copies [sic]) Samsung (who use the designation with an Android device) in the use of "Mini"? And then want to stop Samsung using it?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The new SCO ??
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 03:45 AM EDT
Slightly misleading title to article but still

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The Janet and John USPTO Guide to How Computers Work
Authored by: Ian Al on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 06:37 AM EDT
While making another comment I rediscovered this in a USPTO Guideline.
(i) Safe Harbors

- Independent Physical Acts (Post-Computer Process Activity)


A process is statutory if it requires physical acts to be performed outside the computer independent of and following the steps to be performed by a programmed computer, where those acts involve the manipulation of tangible physical objects and result in the object having a different physical attribute or structure. Thus, if a process claim includes one or more post- computer process steps that result in a physical transformation outside the computer (beyond merely conveying the direct result of the computer operation, see Section IV.B.2(d)(iii)), the claim is clearly statutory.

Examples of this type of statutory process include the following:

  • A method of curing rubber in a mold which relies upon updating process parameters, using a computer processor to determine a time period for curing the rubber, using the computer processor to determine when the time period has been reached in the curing process and then opening the mold at that stage.
  • A method of controlling a mechanical robot which relies upon storing data in a computer that represents various types of mechanical movements of the robot, using a computer processor to calculate positioning of the robot in relation to given tasks to be performed by the robot, and controlling the robot's movement and position based on the calculated position.
  • The first example is a summary of the successful Diehr court case. However, the description echoes a previous comment of macliam that the invention is very close to the failed Flook invention. It is only that the computer uses a range setting algorithm and follows through to directly control the machinery that saves it.

    How about the second example? §100 says that methods are included in the definition of process. §101 says that the post process activity must be significant and useful. This method does not produce a manufacture or composition of matter. Its post process activity is making a robot move. It is not a particular robot and the movement is abstract. For the post process activity to be other than abstract, their would have to be a non-abstract set of robot commands and a non-abstract relationship of computer data manipulation and the movement of the robot achieving a specific useful result.

    I'm afraid that a computer processor 'imparting spherical seismic energy waves into the earth from a seismic source' and 'converting the spherical seismic energy waves into electrical signals which provide a geophysical representation of formations below the earth's surface' are too far above my pay grade to comment on. However, it is beyond dispute that 'geophysical exploration of formations below the surface of the earth has real world value'. I'm just not sure that this invention does that and fits the §101 requirement for 'new and useful'. It's not as if seismic wave geophysical testing is new or that computers have not been used for the abstract representation of all sorts of test data in the past. If Flook stands for the rejection of a load of activities brought together in a non-novel way to do a job, why is this any different?
    Manipulation of Data Representing Physical Objects or Activities (Pre-Computer Process Activity)

    Another statutory process is one that requires the measurements of physical objects or activities to be transformed outside of the computer into computer data, where the data comprises signals corresponding to physical objects or activities external to the computer system, and where the process causes a physical transformation of the signals which are intangible representations of the physical objects or activities.

    Examples of this type of claimed statutory process include the following:

  • ...

  • A method of using a computer processor to receive data representing Computerized Axial Tomography ("CAT") scan images of a patient, performing a calculation to determine the difference between a local value at a data point and an average value of the data in a region surrounding the point, and displaying the difference as a gray scale for each point in the image, and displaying the resulting image. In this example the data is an intangible representation of a physical object, i.e., portions of the anatomy of a patient. The transformation occurs when the condition of the human body is measured with X-rays and the X-rays are converted into electrical digital signals that represent the condition of the human body. The real world value of the invention lies in creating a new CAT scan image of body tissue without the presence of bones.

  • A method of using a computer processor to conduct seismic exploration, by imparting spherical seismic energy waves into the earth from a seismic source, generating a plurality of reflected signals in response to the seismic energy waves at a set of receiver positions in an array, and summing the reflection signals to produce a signal simulating the reflection response of the earth to the seismic energy. In this example, the electrical signals processed by the computer represent reflected seismic energy. The transformation occurs by converting the spherical seismic energy waves into electrical signals which provide a geophysical representation of formations below the earth's surface. Geophysical exploration of formations below the surface of the earth has real world value.

    If a claim does not clearly fall into one or both of the safe harbors, the claim may still be statutory if it is limited by the language in the claim to a practical application in the technological arts.
  • This introduces a new technical concept on how a computer and other stuff works and also a new legal definition of the word 'useful'. The commentary uses the phrase 'The real world value of the invention'. In other words, the invention does not have to be useful to be statutory: it just needs to have a real world value. The method of printing a book has a real world value because it gives us books to read in the real world.

    The new technology is that 'The transformation occurs when the condition of the human body is measured with X-rays and the X-ray measurements are converted into electrical digital signals that represent the condition of the human body.' Measuring the human body with X-rays is a significant novelty in its own right, but the crucial step is transforming those measurements into digital signals representing the human condition. This is a far cry from patenting the formula E=mc2 ( i.e., the relationship between energy and mass). That has no patentable real world value.
    (ii) Computer-Related Processes Limited to a Practical Application in the Technological Arts There is always some form of physical transformation within a computer because a computer acts on signals and transforms them during its operation and changes the state of its components during the execution of a process. Even though such a physical transformation occurs within a computer, such activity is not determinative of whether the process is statutory because such transformation alone does not distinguish a statutory computer process from a non-statutory computer process. What is determinative is not how the computer performs the process, but what the computer does to achieve a practical application.

    A process that merely manipulates an abstract idea or performs a purely mathematical algorithm is non-statutory despite the fact that it might inherently have some usefulness.

    For such subject matter to be statutory, the claimed process must be limited to a practical application of the abstract idea or mathematical algorithm in the technological arts.

    For example, a computer process that simply calculates a mathematical algorithm that models noise is non-statutory. However, a claimed process for digitally filtering noise employing the mathematical algorithm is statutory.

    Examples of this type of claimed statutory process include the following:

  • A computerized method of optimally controlling transfer, storage and retrieval of data between cache and hard disk storage devices such that the most frequently used data is readily available.
  • A method of controlling parallel processors to accomplish multi-tasking of several computing tasks to maximize computing efficiency.
  • A method of making a word processor by storing an executable word processing application program in a general purpose digital computer's memory, and executing the stored program to impart word processing functionality to the general purpose digital computer by changing the state of the computer's arithmetic logic unit when program instructions of the word processing program are executed.

  • A digital filtering process for removing noise from a digital signal comprising the steps of calculating a mathematical algorithm to produce a correction signal and subtracting the correction signal from the digital signal to remove the noise.
  • This is another revelation about how computers work. In the previous section we learn how bodies are measured by X-rays and then the measurements are transformed into digital signals which are sent to the computer for it to display as the human condition. Here is a new concept whereby the computer, itself, transforms the real world into digital signals and then manipulates the real world signals in a way that provides real world value. In one example, the computer transforms noise sound waves into analogue electrical noise sound wave signals and then to digital noise sound wave signals. The patented process is the calculation of a mathematical algorithm to remove the digital noise sound wave signals thus providing real world value. The description is silent on how anyone in the real world gets any value. Perhaps the removed noise sound wave signals are not transformed back into non-airwaves for people not to hear. Hey, but, don't let me minimise the substantial advance in math science of being able to calculate algorithms.

    I'm a bit more worried about the word processor example. It uses the words 'executing the stored program to impart word processing functionality to the general purpose digital computer by changing the state of the computer's arithmetic logic unit when program instructions of the word processing program are executed'. That does not sound right to me. I thought that the state of the ALU was unchanged as are all the other parts of the processor that computes the algorithmic steps that 'execute the programs'.
    (c) Non-Statutory Process Claims If the "acts" of a claimed process manipulate only numbers, abstract concepts or ideas, or signals representing any of the foregoing, the acts are not being applied to appropriate subject matter. Thus, a process consisting solely of mathematical operations,

    i.e., converting one set of numbers into another set of numbers, does not manipulate appropriate subject matter and thus cannot constitute a statutory process.

    In practical terms, claims define non-statutory processes if they:

    consist solely of mathematical operations without some claimed practical application ( i.e., executing a "mathematical algorithm"); or simply manipulate abstract ideas, e.g., a bid or a bubble hierarchy, without some claimed practical application.

    A claimed process that consists solely of mathematical operations is non-statutory whether or not it is performed on a computer. Courts have recognized a distinction between types of mathematical algorithms, namely, some define a "law of nature" in mathematical terms and others merely describe an "abstract idea."Certain mathematical algorithms have been held to be non- statutory because they represent a mathematical definition of a law of nature or a natural phenomenon. For example, a mathematical algorithm representing the formula E=mc is a "law of nature"--it defines a "fundamental scientific truth" ( i.e., the relationship between energy and mass). To comprehend how the law of nature relates to any object, one invariably has to perform certain steps ( e.g., multiplying a number representing the mass of an object by the square of a number representing the speed of light). In such a case, a claimed process which consists solely of the steps that one must follow to solve the mathematical representation of E=mc is indistinguishable from the law of nature and would "preempt" the law of nature. A patent cannot be granted on such a process.

    Other mathematical algorithms have been held to be non- statutory because they merely describe an abstract idea. An "abstract idea" may simply be any sequence of mathematical operations that are combined to solve a mathematical problem. The concern addressed by holding such subject matter non-statutory is that the mathematical operations merely describe an idea and do not define a process that represents a practical application of the idea.

    Accordingly, when a claim reciting a mathematical algorithm is found to define non-statutory subject matter the basis of the § 101 rejection must be that, when taken as a whole, the claim recites a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea.
    It seems to me that the claimed statutory parts of this piece are based on the knowledge that computers are magic and are capable of any function of real world value. If they ever discover that computers only manipulate signs and that the computer's state is not changed by execution a program then they will have a lot of redrafting to do. They also have to disabuse themselves of the idea that computers can suck in real world things like the human condition and sound waves and manipulate those real things in a way that has real world value. When all these are gone, all they have left is 'converting one set of numbers into another set of numbers, does not manipulate appropriate subject matter and thus cannot constitute a statutory process'.

    ---
    Regards
    Ian Al
    Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid!

    [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

    India's top court rejects Novartis cancer drug patent "evergreening" bid
    Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 07:40 AM EDT
    The Swiss pharmaceutical giant has fought a legal battle in India since 2006 to patent a new version of Glivec, which is mainly used to treat leukemia and is known as Gleevec outside India and Europe. The earlier version of Glivec did not have a patent, because it was introduced into India before the country adopted its first patent law in 2005.

    India's patent office rejected the company's patent application, arguing the drug was not a new medicine but an amended version of its earlier product. The patent authority cited a provision in the 2005 patent law aimed at preventing companies from getting fresh patents for making only minor changes to existing medicines — a practice known as "evergreening."

    Novartis appealed, arguing the drug was a more easily absorbed version of Glivec and that it qualified for a patent.

    CBC

    [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

    Apple patents
    Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 07:45 AM EDT
    should this be allowed? yet another phone shape patent

    [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

    Dell admits being a PC maker is a dead end in new SEC filing
    Authored by: JamesK on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 11:46 AM EDT
    There’s a good reason Dell (DELL) wants to go private and back out of the traditional PC business: Because it thinks selling computers based on Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows operating system is quickly becoming a dead end.

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    Dell outlines the death of the PC in SEC filing
    Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 11:52 AM EDT
    The message that the era of the PC is coming to a close comes from a company at the heart of the industry – Dell.

    In a proxy statement submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission relating to the company’s plans to go private, the company outlines, in very clear language, that the PC train has hit the buffers.

    Outlines are the “various risks and uncertainties related to continued ownership of Common Stock,” and it makes scary reading for anyone operating within the industry, or who holds stock in the company.

    Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Forbes

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    Notebooks continue to shape the virtual word
    Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 04:18 PM EDT
    "With the obsessive neatness that goes with the beginning of a project," [Bruce Chatwin] wrote, "I made three neat stacks of my 'Paris' notebooks. In France, these notebooks are known as carnets moleskines: 'moleskine', in this case, being its black oilcloth binding. Each time I went to Paris, I would buy a fresh supply from a papeterie in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie."
    Skeuomorphism? Phooeymorphism! guardian.co.uk

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    The game of Monopoly has a long and checkered history
    Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 05:53 PM EDT
    In the 1970s, the owners of Parker Brothers, General Mills, sued an economics professor for marketing a parody game called Anti-Monopoly. The suit was rejected on appeal when it was realized that the original game of Monopoly was, in fact, stolen.
    Business Careers Guide

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    be interesting to see that appeal decision

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