The failing US patent system is getting ever more mainstream - The New York Times is running a long and details piece on the failings of the system, especially in relation to the technology industry most of us hold so dearly. Most of the stuff in there isn't new to us - but there's two things in the article I want to highlight.
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Member since:2006-05-23
Okay, I suppose that's not a great example. Even so...
They're on getting a monoply on a product you conceived.
How is this not a problem? Even in theory it allows the inventor to have a stranglehold on X product and anything derived from X product. Yay price fixing.
Mind, IRL it's usually not the inventor who has the patent, it's the corporation the inventor works for. So it's not even like the interests of the actual inventor are being protected.
Member since:2011-09-15
The inventor having a strangle hold on the product is the purpose of the system. Otherwise inventors and their investors will have a huge competitive disadvantage. For example, medicins take a lot of investment, but they are very cheap to reverse-engieer.
I think that we should just define a patentable idea as something which can be produced as a good or service. And only specifically that, deriative idea's are not included in the rights of the patent-holder. And a requirement for a patent should be that the holder actually produces the good or the service. Easy as that.
By abolishing the patent system entirely, many industries will stagnate because of the mear cost of innovation and small, innovatng bussinesses crushed by multi-nationals, because of their shear resources.
We must be careful what we wish for.
Member since:2005-07-06
"If only we have the right people in charge it would be okay" (in this context, "smarter patent authority")...
I dunno about you, but after seeing government after government try that route, I just don't think it's going to work.
Those with incentive to game the system end up corrupting it through various influences; the only way to win is to reduce the power of the system.
"A tiny 32 bit kernel written in Rust. I was inspired to download Rust and try to do this after seeing zero.rs - a stub that lets Rust programs run almost freestanding. It paints the screen bright red and then hangs. That's it."
"Today I pushed out a new ISO of my Wayland Live CD project, which is named for my favorite celebrity. For this new Wayland CD, I wrote a new login manager with Bash and Zenity and Expect (and Script) that fully runs on a Wayland server (weston). Now X is no longer involved in the boot process, and X does not start, (unless you use an X application with xwayland), because I replaced LightDM with the new loginmanager."
"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.
The Tizen Greek Community has some screenshots of a very recent build of Tizen running on a Samsung GT-i8800. It looks wholly unremarkable.Joint statement to The Next Web from Microsoft and Google: "Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube's API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time." Good to know these children stopped acting like little pricks. Can we have full Google support in Windows 8 now, please?
Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
"Sources have described iOS 7 as 'black, white, and flat all over'. This refers to the dropping of heavy textures and the addition of several new black and white user interface elements." I couldn't be happier.
"Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers, and has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues.""Google is facing a new antitrust probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into whether the company is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition, people familiar with the matter said." Sucks to be Google today, apparently."In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies.
Member since:
2011-09-15
Terrible conterexample. Is F = ma a product produced by a company? No. Patents aren't a tool to get a monopoly on applying a law of nature. They're on getting a monoply on a product you conceived. A good patent office would know this.