Weekly Edition
Return to the Press page
| |||||||||||||
Microsoft's TomTom patents posted for patent review (Linux-Watch)
Linux-Watch covers an
Open Invention Network (OIN) announcement that three of the eight
patents cited in Microsoft's lawsuit against TomTom have been posted for
prior art review by the Linux community. "The three patents cited by
Microsoft that cover the FAT filesystem and related technology --
U.S. patents 5579517, 5758352, and 6256642 -- have been posted on the
Post-Issue Peer-to-Patent website associated with Linux Defenders, says
OIN. The patents also cover flash-erasable programmable ROM and a GUI
related patent, said OIN CEO Keith Bergelt in a phone interview."
(Log in to post comments)
Microsoft's TomTom patents posted for patent review (Linux-Watch) Posted Apr 29, 2009 9:10 UTC (Wed) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] The Microsoft FAT patent has been invalidated in Germany in 2007, for three reasons: It is obvious to one skilled in the art, it has prior art in the rock ridge extension for isofs, and it does not contain a proper teaching. See Summery on Heise Online (in German) for more. I have no idea why the USPTO reinstated the FAT patent in 2006, maybe the bribe was high enough.
Monopoly Report Posted Apr 29, 2009 11:08 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] "The whole key is to have the community recognize that this is an opportunity to contribute to our role, which is to make the world safe for Linux," he said. To make the world safe for Linux, eh? A bunch of companies with a vested interest in perpetuating the patentability of software want the community to overturn the most fraudulent patents, thus keeping the system intact and reserving the right to insist that all their patents are of "high quality" and "legitimate" should anyone put the patent system under any level of critical review. The community would be better off persuading legislators to get rid of software patents instead of doing OIN's bidding, especially since the pay would be the same either way.
Monopoly Report Posted Apr 29, 2009 11:49 UTC (Wed) by viiru (subscriber, #53129) [Link]
> The community would be better off persuading legislators to get rid of
> software patents instead of doing OIN's bidding, especially since the pay > would be the same either way.
Naturally a world without patent insanity would be better, but can we get there? I think getting rid of the most problematic patents is worthwhile, but opinions may of course differ here.
Monopoly Report Posted Apr 29, 2009 12:38 UTC (Wed) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] Of course we can get there. However, the way to get there is to make live for those in power as bad as possible so that they will think about it. E.g. just assume NTP vs. RIM wouldn't have happened during the Bush era, but now with Obama? RIM (in Canada) could just have said "ok, we'll stop supporting the USA, and as a first step, we have disabled the Blackberry of Barack Obama." Rest assured, you would have got your patent system terminating act by tomorrow. Now if we just move the most obviously fraudulent patents out of the way (the FAT patent obviously is one of them), we repair the system so that it keeps just useable enough so that the pain is not too big. When the pain is not too big, you'll never get a revolution. But that's what we need: a revolution about how to treat IP: as annoying nuisence of the past.
IP, patents != software patents Posted Apr 29, 2009 12:46 UTC (Wed) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link]
People with their heads inside the sand hole are well advised to remember that there is far more to IP and patents than software. If you just mean "software patents", make sure to be clear about it.
Trying to go against the big pharmaceutical companies is a very different game, for example.
IP, patents != software patents Posted Apr 29, 2009 13:09 UTC (Wed) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] Historic proves differently: When the anthrax hystery hit the USA shortly after 9-11, the patent of a German pharmaceutical company was just put aside, and Bush allowed to produce cheap generics. Software patents might be "easy", because the vast majority of software developers oppose them, anyway, but if you consider health cost, it could be a lot easier to convince Obama (who wants to create affordable health insurance anyway) that patents are a bad idea. The bad effect of patents on health costs are much more obvious than the bad effects on software patents, where free software is a major competitor, even though stiffled by software patents.
IP, patents != software patents Posted Apr 29, 2009 14:01 UTC (Wed) by michel (subscriber, #10186) [Link]
>Rest assured, you would have got your patent system terminating act by tomorrow.
That shows IMO some serious ignorance on the current political system in the US. >The bad effect of patents on health costs are much more obvious That shows IMO some serious ignorance on the issue of health care costs. Perhaps you can post some facts to support this position.
Although I do think that the patent system is broken (perhaps more so in the software space, but I'm not sure to be honest), simply posting an example of a few bad patents does not prove much.
IP, patents != software patents Posted Apr 29, 2009 15:29 UTC (Wed) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] Health care cost: There are of course several contributors to health care, and medication appears to be relatively "low". However, the statistics I know of Germany don't include the relatively expensive drugs used in stationary treatment (e.g. cancer treatment), because this is included in the cost of stationary treatment (the largest portion). Germany and the USA are similar in cost structure, since both have no agreement with the pharmaceutic industry about cost reduction, and are generally high-price countries. The cost effect of patents in health cost are two: First of all, the price for a drug is much higher than without intellectual monopoly. But second, and this is much more important: The real price for this is not paid in the USA. It is paid in developing countries, who simply can not afford these drugs, even though the production of the drug is cheap enough. They pay with millions of dead people if they give in and agree to WIPO (if not, their drug fabs will be bombed, and we will be told that it was Al Qaida producing weapons there...). But if you like to read a lot of more carefully researched facts, Boldrin and Levine have done the research in their book: Against Intellectual Monopolies, chapter 9. I've one personal point to add: My mother suffers from a rare disease. A Dutch and an US company developed a medicament against it (it is an enzyme replacement therapy, so what they do is to produce the missing enzyme - only a patent on process should be possible for that). The incentive for the US company founder was that two of his children suffered from this disease. This is exactly the point we argue in free software: "it scratches an itch". Money is only one possible incentive.
IP, patents != software patents Posted Apr 29, 2009 16:24 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
The drug industry as a whole is currently essentially driven by the excess profits from patents. These profits go to the big drug companies, which don't actually develop anything interesting most of the time, but buy startups that have developed things. The startups are funded by venture capital, which funds a ton of independent companies in the hopes that a small fraction of them will make useful drugs and will get bought, covering the loss that the VCs have on the ones that don't work out, so the VC investment returns average out to something reasonable, so that pension funds and endowments and so forth will put some of their money into them, and there will be money in the system in the first place.
Of course, this is a lousy and inefficient mechanism; the process should probably be driven from the other end, by government funding directed by NIH, CDC, and NSF (and other countries' equivalents) to entities (drug companies, academia, etc) that will do the government-owned research to make the drugs that solve public health problems. But there needs to be some funding source in place for this research that won't completely dry up any time a government is more focused on military spending than science and medicine, before discarding the current funding source.
Of course, there are other motives for drug development than money, but those motives drive the researchers' interest (and maybe even substitute for their pay), but won't buy the equipment that makes the process work on a reasonable time scale.
IP, patents != software patents Posted Apr 29, 2009 17:09 UTC (Wed) by michel (subscriber, #10186) [Link]
Yes, I think you are absolutely right and I intuitively want to agree with
>the process should probably be driven from the other end, by government funding directed by NIH, CDC, and NSF... But I am not convinced that the outcome of such a funding model would be a healthier existence for the world's population overall, even having read chapter 9 of the book mentioned above (a worthwhile read). Money does tend to be a good motivator.
The patent system seems anachronistic and broken (especially in the software space). But I would want to see some convincing arguments that getting rid of it would improve the situation. Microsoft settling out of court with TomTom and invalidating a bunch of obvious (certainly with our advantage of hindsight) patents does not convince me.
IP, patents != software patents Posted Apr 29, 2009 18:18 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
Driving the process from the other end wouldn't change the fact that money is ultimately the driving factor. At the highest level of abstraction, health care entities (largely insurance companies and governments) spend money which ends up funding the research process. With government-sponsored research, the researchers would be seeking government grants, instead of drug companies advertising to prescribing doctors. It's not like governments would mandate that, by law, a disease would be cured; they're still spending money, only they'd be spending it directly on developing the next drug, rather than funding the next drug by paying a premium on the previous one.
For that matter, one of the entities that should be directly funding research is insurance companies that would be able to treat subscribers less expensively in the future if certain drugs were available at production cost. That is, it costs an insurance company less to give a subscriber a treatment which cures their diabetes than it does to keep the subscriber healthy despite having diabetes, so it's in their financial interests to fund the search for a cure, up to the amount it would save them.
One of the problems with the current system is actually that drug companies don't have a financial interest in cures, because they don't generate ongoing revenue from the product. Simplifying the flow of money around the system also stops it from going through entities that have profit motives that conflict with the benefit to the eventual recipients. (Not that the companies can't be altruistic, but they need to avoid curing diabetes in order to maintain the revenue that goes to developing treatments for tuberculosis, due to the offset income/expense pattern.)
IP, patents != software patents Posted Apr 29, 2009 17:18 UTC (Wed) by Oddscurity (guest, #46851) [Link]
I was thinking of upping it a level further: World Health Organisation. Countries would pay a pittance to what they now spend stocking up on drugs to subside the research, and without patents on medication, their public healthcare bills would go down loads as well.
|
|||||||||||||