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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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Sued for Twitter comments .. | 116 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
List of topics that are not allowed in "Off Topic"
Authored by: artp on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 12:30 PM EDT
Rectangles. Absolutely nothing about rectangles.
No foremen, so unions are out.
Apple abandoned a trial over FRAND in Wisconsin. No cheese.
Suit in Germany - no beer.
Same for Korea - no kimchee.
Ditto Japan - no Kobe beef, which leaves out Big Hat Darl
and SCO.
UIs are right out.
The numbers 4 and 5 and anything to do with docking bars are
out.

Maybe we should define what we CAN talk about instead?

Has Canada been infected yet?

---
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 | # ]

Boston Bomber Captured - World Cheers - Many Cherished Rights Suspended - What Price Freedom?
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 12:32 PM EDT
constitutional gang rape

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Government Makes Rainwater Illegal
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 01:07 PM EDT
Government Makes Rainwater Illegal

Is this for real or an april's fool prank?

One comment says:

"December 11, 2012 at 5:39 am Don says: Utah attempted to set it right with SB32, Rainwater Harvesting, in March of 2010. The legislation was incorporated into UT Code (73-3-1.5) but the kicker is that a) you are limited to either a 2500 gallon underground or two 100 gallon above ground containers and b) you have to REGISTER with the State Engineer via a website (http://waterrights.utah.gov/forms/rainwater.asp), which still shows that the gov’t, not you, owns the water. I happen to have a water right that came with my rural property, so I don’t think I have to register but I’m still finding out that information."

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Patents, the 'Inherent Operation of a Machine', in Diamond v. Bradley
Authored by: macliam on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 06:53 PM EDT

I was looking into an old case, Diamond v. Bradley concerning a patent application on computer firmware that came before the Supreme Court at the same time as Diamond v. Diehr. Indeed oral argument for the two cases before the Supreme Court took place on the same day, October 14, 1980, and the judgment in Diamond v. Bradley was announced a few days after Diehr and was very short:

PER CURIAM.

The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Court.

THE CHIEF JUSTICE took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.

(It seems that Chief Justice Warren Burger held stock in Honeywell Information Systems Inc. who were the assignees of the patent, and he therefore recused himself.)

This patent was one of a number concerned with improvements to the Honeywell Series 60, Level 64, computer. It appears that Bradley's patent application concerned an improvement to a multi-tasking computer that took the form of firmware to be run in a microprocessor. Apparently scratchpad registered were maintained in the microprocessor for efficiency in its normal operation, and these were inaccessible to the multi-tasking operating system operating in main memory. This caused problems when switching between processes, so the inventor developed a firmware routine for updating the scratchpad registers and synchronizing them with a data structure in main memory accessible to the operating system. (The previous description may well be inaccurate: I am certainly not an expert in operating systems, microprocessors, firmware, or forty-year-old computer operating systems.) The legally significant point concerning the invention is that the difference between the invention and the prior art consisted entirely in the firmware routine, and neither the PTO for the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA) saw any legal distinction between firmware and software. Thus the novel subject matter consisted entirely of a computer program.

The oral argument is available, with a transcript, from the Diamond v. Bradley page at the Oyez Project (which makes available recordings and transcripts of oral arguments at the Supreme Court going back decades).

My Wallace, the lawyer for the Commissioner of Patents, argued against the theory that programming a computer with new software produced a new machine. The Piano Roll Blues argument duly found its way into his argument before the Court:

And we have also addressed in our reply brief the possibility of a doctrine of transitory novelty where a particular selection put into a player piano or a particular letter or a memorandum inserted into a word processor that hasn't been in the word processor before... you know, those machines that are replacing typewriters in offices... would transform the machine for the moment into a new machine.

This has never been a doctrine recognized under the patent law and would have the same drawbacks, the same inconsistencies of established law as I have described.

Earlier in his oral argument, Mr. Wallace made reference to a doctrine of patent law concerned with “the inherent operation of a machine” that might prove relevant in trying to argue that certain troll patent claims are invalid:

And indeed the fact that the application is put as a machine claim rather than a process claim, if anything raises possible additional impediments to the granting of the application because of the cases we've collected on page 17 of our brief, in which this Court has consistently held that a claim describing the inherent operation of a known machine is not statutory subject matter.

Obviously, whether the machine was capable of executing the program that respondents have devised was predetermined by the design of the machine itself, and the inventor of that machine should hardly be excluded under the patent laws from uses of the machine which were inherent in the operation that he built into the machine, which is really what's involved here.

As we further point out, there is also the problem that allowing this as a new machine claim would extend the life of the patent on the machine through a new machine claim that essentially just describes one of the inherent operations of the machine.

I should wrap up this comment, and will do so with a few links. The issued patent is 4,351,024. Most of the diagrams and text (describing the embodiment) are essentially irrelevant: since the claim is to a multi-tasking computer incorporating the improvement, the claim needs to explain to the Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art (or PHOSITA), how to construct a multi-tasking operating system for a 1970's computer before going on to discuss the specifics of the invention. Moreover the essentially irrelevant text and diagrams appear verbatim in a number of other patent applications by Honeywell from that period. Also available on Google Scholar is Judge Rich's opinion for the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals.

I suggest that an understanding of these old cases might be of relevance if someone were contemplating writing an amicus curiae brief for the Supreme Court arguing that patent claims asserted by some PAE are invalid. I may comment further on this, in another comment, to try to explain why an argument involving the “inherent operation of a machine” might prove to be of assistance in making a case against such a patent claim.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Java 8 Delayed for Security Beefup
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 09:22 PM EDT
Mark Reinhold’s Blog

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Wiretap Keeps Up-to-date
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 09:47 PM EDT
wired.com

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Sued for Twitter comments ..
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 10:39 PM EDT
"A woman who complained about an unpaid £146 invoice is facing a libel battle that could cost her more than £100,000."

"Lesley Kemp, 55, took to Twitter claiming that a company based in the Middle East had failed to pay her promptly for transcription work."

"Now the firm is suing Mrs Kemp, of Milton Keynes, for defamation, claiming up to £50,000 in damages and a further £70,000 in costs."

"The company, Resolution Productions, based in Qatar, has yet to comment." link

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Dell's Ubuntu just works ...
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 11:00 PM EDT
"The remarkable thing about the XPS 13 Developer Edition is that it's so unremarkable—it has Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installed out of the box, and it simply works .. The XPS 13 DE shows the level of functionality and polish possible with extra effort, and that effort and polish together means this kind of Linux integration is something we won't see very often outside of boutique OEMs." li nk

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Blackstone Drops Dell Bid ..
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 11:29 PM EDT
'Blackstone Group LP pulled out of bidding for Dell Inc. amid concerns about a worsening global PC slump, taking pressure off Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell to sweeten his original $24.4 billion buyout offer.` link

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

CipherCloud sends DCMA takedown notice to Crypto.StackExchange
Authored by: hardmath on Sunday, April 21 2013 @ 07:27 AM EDT

As shown in this "meta" thread Crypto.StackExchange.com, one of a family of sites that hosts Q&A style community content, a recent question about analysis of encryption products by CipherCloud resulted in a DCMA takedown notice.

Images of the notice from Michael Bartz, Senionr Corporate Counsel at CipherCloud, are shown in the above link and may also be found at PDF Archive.

The wider StackExchange community response revolves around a proposal to send all such takedown notices to EFF's Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.

The three DCMA violations claimed appear to relate, at least in part, to use of the CipherCloud trademark and to screen captures of output from CipherCloud products, in which copyright is claimed by CipherCloud. Tacked onto to these are allegations that answers critiquing the CipherCloud products are "false, misleading, or libelous... defamatory" and Lanham Act violations as "unfair competition".

Concern is expressed that such notices may be used to discourage legitimate cryptanalysis of proprietary products, and that the claimed violations may not be permitted the defenses available under US law.

---
Recursion is the opprobrium of the mathists.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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