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A new VFAT patent avoidance patchA new VFAT patent avoidance patchPosted Jun 28, 2009 1:02 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: A new VFAT patent avoidance patch by sbergman27 Parent article: A new VFAT patent avoidance patch
> In my view, the laws make it unnecessarily easy for people to use guns to kill people. (But that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely.) The person pulling the trigger bears some responsibility for any killing they do. And MS did just recently pull the trigger against Tom Tom.
It sort a works like that, but sort of doesn't.
The law requires that people protect their patents or otherwise they will lose them. Microsoft needs their patents in order to protect themselves from other companies that wouldn't hesitate go after them. Microsoft has been the subject to numerous lawsuits regarding patents in the past. They've been sued under MP3 related patents, been sued for browser plugins, etc etc. All over the place.
In other words... the less you use your patents the more you are at risk of patent lawsuits.
Guns, in a armed society, operate mostly on a deterant level. I cities were there is a large amount of in-house gun ownership there tends to be much less home invasion and burglarly. I don't need to own a gun personally to benefit from that sort of thing.. the statistically likelihood that a violent attacker is met with deadly force is mearly enough to protect me. It's in towns with high levels of private gun ownership laws have the highest rates of that sort of violence because it's unlikely that private, law-abiding citizens are going to be able to protect themselves. (while gun laws have very little effect on the ability for criminals to arm themselves... the Washington DC area is a perfect example of that.)
It's a analogy that does not really work.
(this is why if you look at rates of gun ownership in the USA they do not correlate with rates of gun violence. Areas high in violence have the most restrictive laws and relatively low per-capita gun ownership.. were places (mostly rural) everybody and their mom owns a gun but the rate of gun deaths are low. If you want a correlation between gun violence and something.. that "something" is rates of illicit drug use and drug trafficing. People addicted to "dangerous" drugs do extreme things in their desperation and black-market gun trade attracts violate criminal elements. If you want to solve gun violence in the USA the best first step will be to semi-legalize drugs and remove the capitalistic incentives for the underground drug trade.)
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A new VFAT patent avoidance patch Posted Jun 28, 2009 1:24 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
if people lost their patents by not enforcing them there would be no such thing as a 'submarine' patent
there have been too many cases where something has been in use for years and then the patent owner starts to demand licensing for things to work the way you say they do in the real world.
I think that it's trademarks that have to be defended or you loose them.
A new VFAT patent avoidance patch Posted Jun 28, 2009 2:22 UTC (Sun) by tao (guest, #17563) [Link]
+1 Insightful.
You're totally correct. Patents can be enforced or not on a totally arbitrary basis. Copyrights likewise. Trademarks have to be enforced strictly though, or they risk being considered void.
If patents had to be enforced non-arbitrarily not to lose validity, a lot less patent trolling would take place, since few if any trolls would dare go up against IBM or Microsoft in a patent court. And with its multitude of patents, IBM would not be able to do any sales/development, they'd be too busy spending time in court.
Mild straw man Posted Jun 29, 2009 12:10 UTC (Mon) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]
To achieve the goal you have set up, you would need to change patents from being a granted monopoly with the right to exclude others from doing what you claim monopoly in. What you'd change them to, I can only guess, and it looks like this: a person applies for a patent for a novel and inventive device or method, which is near-automatically granted based on search results. Then if litigation is to occur, the apparent rights-holder has to have the patent examined as to novelty and non-obvious inventive concept.
This would have your must-be-enforced criterion met. As it stands, international law has a qualification that a patent holder may have their patent revoked if they aren't in business and making use of their patented device or method -- and if also the challenger can show that such behaviour has harmed their business, which is unheard-of in my experience of patent practice.
However, there's a downside to this approach: with a granted but unexamined patent (or a few hundred of them) I can threaten you much more cheaply than with present full-monopoly patents. So I think that the change would make the situation worse.
K3n.
no, patents are not "enforce or lose" Posted Jun 28, 2009 3:35 UTC (Sun) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] It is a requirement that if you have a trademark, you have to enforce it or you risk losing it. There is no such requirement connected with patents. Microsoft was under no obligation to sue anyone for infringing a patent.If there were such a requirement, the legal system would be completely deadlocked, because every software product on the market, plus most open source programs, infringes patents. If drag were right, everyone would be required to sue. But a lawsuit over a patent is always a choice.
A new VFAT patent avoidance patch Posted Jun 28, 2009 3:40 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
"""
The law requires that people protect their patents or otherwise they will lose them. """
A very common misconception. Others have commented upon that. My first thought when I read it was about how convoluted our laws governing various forms of IP are, and how even people paying attention can lose track of the ball. But then it occurred to me that in this case, it makes a great deal of sense for trademarks to be handled in this way, and differently from patents and copyrights. If you aren't defending your old trademark... it's not really your trademark anymore.
Once government gets into the business of handing out monopolies (and we've actually moved out of the realm of "limited monopolies", haven't we?) things get complicated fast, even without the influence of special interests.
No wonder the wise folks at the Philadelphia Convention tried to be conservative in that vein. Unfortunately, they seem to have had more confidence in the Congressional branch they were creating than turned out to be warranted.
There's a science fiction short story (the author's name eludes me. Perhaps it was Asimov) in which William Shakespeare is thrown forward in time and ends up in a contemporary college course on the interpretation of the works of Shakespeare... and flunks it.
I sometimes wonder what the framers of the U.S. Constitution would have to say about our current condition, and legal interpretations of their document.
A new VFAT patent avoidance patch Posted Jun 28, 2009 11:14 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
It is Asimov. _The Immortal Bard_. One of the works from his 1940s
efflorescence of creativity.
A new VFAT patent avoidance patch Posted Jun 28, 2009 19:01 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
"""
It is Asimov. _The Immortal Bard_. One of the works from his 1940s efflorescence of creativity. """
*sigh*
He's been gone 17 years... and I still think about him every day, I suspect. I never met him in person. Never corresponded with him. And yet, when he died, I felt as if I had lost a personal friend. An amazing man.
A new VFAT patent avoidance patch Posted Jun 29, 2009 17:01 UTC (Mon) by davide.del.vento (subscriber, #59196) [Link]
Tomorrow I'll patent the verb "to be" and you will need to pay me royalties for almost every sentence you'll write. You are warned!
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