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Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times)Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times)Posted Nov 19, 2012 22:00 UTC (Mon) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656)In reply to: Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times) by Tara_Li Parent article: Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times)
> Can we get the name of the patent official who approved this thing for a public shaming?
Well, what's a little threat of public shaming between, umm, friends?
> [...] followed by a picture of him captioned "This man just gave Apple a patent on this. Seriously, he did."
Except from that it is a she.
Had you actually read the patent you would have seen this line:
Let's just overlook details such as threats, gender issues and reading comprehension, and let us turn to rule by law. Examiners are bound by law. Really, they are. If they go outside the law they can be overruled and if they granted a patent that never should have been granted the patent can be invalidated. When you prosecute patents you will look at all these aspects since a wrongly granted patent is likely an invitation for trouble. The file history is as public as the name of the Examiner. Just where in this 100 MB sized history with more than 70 documents do you see the problem?
If you have an issue with the law you might wish to direct your complaints to those who actually make the laws.
Also, if you read the documents you will see there are other patents relating to this, moreover there is a continuation underway which no doubt will ensure more patent discussions on LWN.
Is it just me or has there been a marked increase in patents related news lately?
And if the readers feel so strongly and also so certain that this is all wrong, wrong, wrong - why not file for reexamination?
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Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times) Posted Nov 20, 2012 14:00 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Well, what's a little threat of public shaming between, umm, friends?
That's how public officials control nameless bureaucrats that work for them.
When bureaucrats enforce some law in a way that is unpopular then some elected bozo swoops in publicly ridicules said bureaucrat and then fires them. In the common vernacular it is called 'Throwing somebody under the bus'.
This is one of the important mechanisms in how our government is ran.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of laws. There have been academic attempts by various groups to try to number the federal laws we have in the USA and they all have failed miserably. It's simply beyond human scope to make sense of any of it. It's a total disaster.
If you take in guidelines and so-called 'administrative law' (ie: arbitrary bureaucratic rules that are created by committee or fiat decision by mid level bureaucrat) you are looking at, very literally, millions of rules. They conflict and most are written to be deliberately vague and difficult to interpret. Most are really badly written and worded on top of that.
So how government law functions in the USA in the past 50 years is that congress runs out and passes laws and creates new authority and bureaucracies with each new crisis. Then they provide funding for 3-5 years to enforce their new laws and groups. After 3-5 years the funding will expire, nobody will have any money to enforce the rules and people that enforce laws that are unpopular or enforce them in a unpopular way are shamed, passed up for promotions, and fired.
There are thousands of news laws and rules passed every month.
This is the literal truth on how the USA federal government is ran and has been ran for the last 75 years or so.
Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times) Posted Nov 22, 2012 21:26 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]
Interestingly, in Australia they thought of a solution for this: automatic sunset clauses. Most legislative instruments must be reviewed on a regular basis or they are automatically repealed:
http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2012C00709
The first expiry dates are in 2015 (for Acts prior to 1930), but by the end of the decade all legislative instruments will have been renewed or repealed.
Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times) Posted Nov 22, 2012 22:25 UTC (Thu) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
> > Well, what's a little threat of public shaming between, umm, friends?
> That's how public officials control nameless bureaucrats that work for them.
> When bureaucrats enforce some law in a way that is unpopular then some elected bozo swoops in publicly ridicules said bureaucrat and then fires them. In the common vernacular it is called 'Throwing somebody under the bus'.
The expression is rather interesting. However I have never heard of any Examiners having been fired. The relationship between patent attorneys/agents on one hand and Examiners on the other can at times be rather tense. Quite a few Examiners are well known within the profession for their style. A few are also known in several fora and one has been banned on one forum. Yet I have never heard of any being fired.
[about the US legal situation]
My impression is that many US lawmakers are themselves lawyers. I don't know of other countries like this.
Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times) Posted Nov 23, 2012 9:58 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] My impression is that many US lawmakers are themselves lawyers. I don't know of other countries like this.You call yourself SecretEuroPatentAgentMan yet don't realise that the largest profession of UK Members of Parliament by far is the law? Bad sign. Perhaps the 'Euro' in your name indicates the eurozone only, or you don't pay attention to politics? (That's not the most disturbing concentration in Parliament though. The most disturbing concentration is the number of members of the front benches who are ex-special advisors, closely followed by the number who have taken Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford. The French grandes ecoles have nothing on this for insularity. That's not to damn PPE at Oxford -- not all PPEers become politicians, my cousin took it but became a Google lawyer instead -- but it is a sign of a dangerous lack of wider experience among the UK political class.)
Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times) Posted Nov 23, 2012 11:43 UTC (Fri) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]
That "Euro" part is to indicate I am somewhere in Europe which incidentally is larger than the Eurozone. It is mildly amusing that you believe I should be an expert in British political matters when the view from GB is "Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off"".
I had the impression that the Parliament and the civil service had a lot of graduates from Oxford and Cambridge (or "both universities", as I once heard it). That the largest profession was law is interesting.
Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times) Posted Nov 23, 2012 12:53 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] In the current parliament the most common prior career is "party hack".
Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times) Posted Nov 23, 2012 10:17 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] I'd be very surprised to find a country where lawyers are not a larger proportion of the legislature than the population at large. America probably ends up with the highest proportion of lawyers simply due to never having had a mainstream socialist party.
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