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
aurology ? | 225 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
aurology ?
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 20 2013 @ 08:48 PM EDT
Right. So are you seriously suggesting that people expect to be rewarded for
carting sand into the desert?

Yes and that a desert of sand.

What you are over looking here is that sand is not fungible.

Normal sand outside a desert, such as river sand, has sharp edges.

Desert sand, wind blown for thousand of years, is round like marbles.

Now suppose you are say in Saudi and you need a foundation and concrete platform
for an oil pump. If you make it from local, desert sand, the foundation will
crumble like rock chalk. If on the other hand you make the foundation out of
imported river sand it will adhere into a hard base just like we are use to in
Europe or America.

So yes I expect to be paid for importing sand to the desert.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

aurology ?
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 21 2013 @ 12:21 AM EDT
Lamentable, no doubt, but the whole point of the patent system is to encourage innovation. If someone's already done it then it's not very innovative, is it? And if you invest significant amounts (where significant is relative to the size of your company) into research without checking whether someone else has already done that research before then I think your investors will want to have a quiet word about "fiduciary duty".

You sound like you've never really worked in industry.

If I work at (say) IBM and I develop something innovative, it will not be published until the patent is filed. In the meantime, HP may have had the same idea, and is using the same strategy -- get it nailed down before making any public disclosure.

There may even be two or more applications made for what seems like the same thing. But they may not be granted in filing order, and they can change while being prosecuted.

In other words, it's entirely possible that my really cool work is eventually obliterated by a patent I couldn't see coming. So while I would say it's not common, it's certainly not a strawman to consider the case where somebody invests significant money in something only to lose the patent race.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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 )