decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

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.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
This will start a forest fire | 172 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Corrections here please
Authored by: jbb on Wednesday, April 24 2013 @ 11:07 PM EDT
...

---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more contexts
than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay

[ Reply to This | # ]

Off Topic here please
Authored by: jbb on Wednesday, April 24 2013 @ 11:08 PM EDT
...

---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more contexts
than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay

[ Reply to This | # ]

News Picks here please
Authored by: jbb on Wednesday, April 24 2013 @ 11:09 PM EDT
Please include a link to the story in your post in case the news pick scrolls
off the Growlaw home page.

---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more contexts
than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay

[ Reply to This | # ]

COMES here please
Authored by: jbb on Wednesday, April 24 2013 @ 11:10 PM EDT
Thank you for your help and support.

---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more contexts
than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay

[ Reply to This | # ]

Common Sense Suggestions
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 24 2013 @ 11:22 PM EDT
No chance of those getting through.

Tufty

[ Reply to This | # ]

This will start a forest fire
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 24 2013 @ 11:56 PM EDT

But it is fairly sensible. The Prior Art issue has bedeviled Hardware, Software, Bioproducts, and Processes for years. Nestlé is currently trying to ram through a patent on a traditional herbal treatment for example. The company is upset at being caught gaming the system, and denies it was doing anything wrong. Of course it still wants the patent to issue.

Then there is Johnson Matthey with their NO2 producing CRT device. Every device before that produced NO2, so exactly why JM was issued a patent (JM knew this before they applied) is unknown.

The filing will upset certain people. I can't wait to hear the screaming.

Wayne
http://madhatter.ca

[ Reply to This | # ]

Barnes & Noble's Common Sense Suggestions to the FTC and DOJ on Patent Trolls ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 12:51 AM EDT
The proposal "Require Losing Patentees to Pay Costs and Expenses, Including
Attorneys’ Fees" would dissuade trolls to some extent. Unfortunately, it
would for all intents and purposes take patent protection away from entities
without deep pockets, in particular, lone inventors of the type who were the
intended beneficiaries of patent protection. Imagine such an inventor has a net
worth of several hundred thousand dollars and has a patent infringed by a large
corporation. The corporation could conspicuously run up its legal costs to the
point where a loss by the small inventor would be ruinous. The situation is
nearly that bad now, since the cost of merely prosecuting an infringement case
is already extremely high, but at least that cost is controllable by the
plaintiff, there is a downside limit. Under B&N's proposal there is no way
to bring an infringement suit, even a valid one, without exposing oneself to an
unlimited downside risk.

The base issue is that patent issues are being resolved slowly and expensively
through the legal system, in which asymmetric resources often determine the
final outcome, instead of being settled quickly and inexpensively, for instance,
by a board of those "skilled in the (relevant) arts". The vast legal
costs in this process would best be eliminated by removing the lawyers and the
courts completely from the determination of whether or not an invention is
obvious, or infringing, by referring the matter to neutral arbiters who work in
the field.

It would also help if the patent office raised the bar many notches, so that
patents were not issued for trivial inventions. Since the PTO seem to be
incapable of doing this by itself, perhaps they should be limited by law to
issuing 10,000 patents a year, all patents to be issued at the end of the year,
and these only after an outside board has ordered all of that year's
"acceptable by the PTO" patents by significance.

[ Reply to This | # ]

One of the truest statements
Authored by: nyarlathotep on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 01:03 AM EDT
"entities that have contributed nothing meaningful to society
or the economy"

[ Reply to This | # ]

I think they are out of their league
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 05:17 AM EDT
We face repeated allegations that anyone using Wi-Fi, anyone using 3G, anyone using MP3, anyone with an e-commerce website, anyone using Ethernet, and, recently, anyone using InfiniBand technology, to name a few, is infringing and must pay a hefty price to license purportedly essential patents.
Essentially, they are arguing that no patents should be enforceable on anything that is useful enough to become ubiquitous.

That's basically a "no patents whatsover, please" stance.

Many of the things they list here tend to involve hardware catered to a specific purpose using specific technology and circuitry. If you can't patent those, you can't patent anything.

Of course, this specific list is far too unspecific to figure out what kind of patents they are objecting to. If they complain about "Wifi" being patentable, is it something like "use of a transmitter/receiver in a portable computer to access communication media via a transmitter/receiver in a fixed housing" or something similarly broad and ridiculous? Or is it something like specific circuitry, or specific modulations?

Similarly with "Ethernet" and "MP3". If any patent required to implement them is supposed to be unenforceable, than the premise is basically "nothing that works well enough to become a de-facto standard should be patentable", and then we might as well stop patents altogether, not just software patents.

In light of the patent quagmire, the proposal of Richard Stallman to except implementations on general-purpose computers has some merit.

One sickness of software patents is that, in essence, too many people are successful by taking something trivial and tacking "on a computer" onto it.

However, computing devices are becoming ubiquitous so it isn't a solution either to prohibit anything to be patentable if you merely can implement it on a computer, or even if nothing but implementation on a computing device makes any sense.

Personally, I find the proposal by Stallman to just exclude implementations running on general purpose computers from patent coverage an interesting compromise. However, things like "Smartphones" can be reasonably considered "general computing devices" in some respects and specialized devices in other respects, so it might be difficult to get to any clear definitions.

But the rough demarcation line, however it would be drawn exactly, is worth thinking about.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Barnes & Noble's Common Sense Suggestions to the FTC and DOJ on Patent Trolls ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 05:39 AM EDT
If you look at the list of companies that have put forward submissions to
the Patent Assertion Entity Activities Workshop
http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/pae/index.shtm one finds Microsoft's
name. Curious then that it is in the news today that ZTE just handed over
a pile of money in a typical Microsoft intellectual property shakedown.
This double standard would be laughable if it weren't so ugly. Way to stay
classy Microsoft.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Except.
Authored by: Doghouse on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 06:00 AM EDT

Suggestion 2 ("Require Actual Reduction to Practice and Commercialization") is seductive (and one we've all come up with here many times). But it's too simplistic, with obvious unwanted consequences as it stands.

The problem that this suggestion is aimed at seems to be entities that exist simply to litigate. Simply requiring that a patent be "reduced to practice and commercialized", by contrast, impacts anyone who has not yet brought - may not even be able to bring - their legitimate patent to actualisation. In particular, like the current system, it plays heavily in favour of large businesses over smaller ones (and even more so over individuals).

This time the issue is resources - who has the resources needed to bring a real patent to practice (or worse, to the market). If you don't have them yourself, or can't find someone to with them prepared to do the job on your behalf, you effectively don't have a patent. The big guys can take your invention, productise it and make millions from it. You can't get a penny, because under this framing of the law you don't have standing to claim. You may have been perfectly willing to license it, but they simply weren't prepared to pay (or offered derisory terms, safe in the knowledge that your choices were to take their terms or get nothing). Effectively you'd be penalised, not for any trolling behaviour, but for simply being too small. That's not what's needed, any more than the current system.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Barnes & Noble's Common Sense Suggestions to the FTC and DOJ on Patent Trolls ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 26 2013 @ 02:08 AM EDT
Sweden already has #1 and #2. Those two alone aids greatly in limitng the amount
of patents. And the Swedush Patents and Registration Office is quite restrictive
with what they grant.

Still, we are #3 in the world when it comes to patents per capita, but without
patent trolls.

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/innovation/patents-by-population.aspx
(but #5 according to
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2011/10/worlds-leading-nations-innov
ation-and-technology/224/#slide5)

[ Reply to This | # ]

Barnes & Noble's Common Sense Suggestions to the FTC and DOJ on Patent Trolls ~pj
Authored by: GrueMaster on Friday, April 26 2013 @ 02:40 AM EDT
And this is why I bought the Nook Color over any other tablet at the time. And
today, I just bought the Nook HD Tablet. I will continue to support B&N as
long as they stand up to bullies from Texas and Redmond, Washington.

---
You've entered a dark place. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue!

[ Reply to This | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )