The author of this blog, James Robertson, passed away in April 2014. This blog is being maintained by David Buck (david@simberon.com).
How else do you explain this patent?
Apple secures a patent for the wedge profile sported by the MacBook Air.
I'll say it again: a system with no patents or copyrights would be an improvement over what we have now....
At this point, I think the only sane answer is to:
Why do I say that? Well, consider the latest idiocy coming from the US PTO:
the company [Amazon] has just received a patent on what has become a common method of giving presents — a system for selecting digital gifts such as movies, music or e-books, sending an electronic notification to a recipient, and allowing them to download the gift.
Never mind technical expertise; what kind of utter moron thought that was worthy of a patent?
If this patent doesn't convince you that software patents are a bad idea, nothing will:
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today published patent 8,161,411 related to a "graphical user interface for browsing, searching, and presenting media items." Apple filed for the patent back in 2004, when the online retail venue was still known as the iTunes Music Store. The patent appears to be quite broad, but focuses solely on the graphical user interface, and not the way in which people might buy songs on the platform or its general functionality. That said, the patent abstract says that the user interface is "suitable for previewing or purchasing media items in an on-line manner."
Does the US PTO screen specifically for idiots?
Technorati Tags: stupidity
I think it's time to seriously consider ending copyrights and patents completely. Ask yourself - could a complete free for all be worse than what we have now?
While most of the tech world was partying at South by Southwest in Austin yesterday, Yahoo announced it was filing a lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly infringing on 10 patents from their 1,000+ patent warehouse.
As if all of that crap Yahoo claims as their work wasn't already done on some BBS system back in the early 90's. Seriously - wipe the slate clean, and just start over.
Every time the Feds try to help me in my work life, things get worse. A while back, they made it harder to contract directly with a company (supposedly to stop exploitation of contract hires). The upshot of that is that now, you pretty much have to work through an agency to get a contract job, and that ups the costs to the hiring firm, and lowers the rate received by the actual contractor.
That was bad enough; now they want to ban overtime for any IT worker who is an employee (or gets paid as one; it's not obvious to me how they draw that line). How exactly does that help anyone? Is this some kind of attempt to force unionization on people if they want to retain higher wages?
Technorati Tags: stupidity
Truth is stranger than fiction:
Believe it or not, SCO isn't dead yet. SCO Group, by its lawyers Boies Schiller & Flexner and Hatch & Dodge, has just asked the US District Court for the District of Utah to reopen [PDF] its litigation against IBM
IP law is getting to the point where it's impossible to parody....
Technorati Tags: stupidity
Patent Trolls aren't just an annoyance - they cost us real money:
Lawsuits from non-practicing entities, or NPEs -- better known as patent trolls -- have cost innovators $500 billion in lost wealth from 1990 through 2010, the BU study found. The study arrived at that figure by observing patent defendants' stock prices following a lawsuit, excluding general market trends and random stock movements.
I'm so pleased that Congress just made trolling easier...
They are now doing more harm than good - notice the patent for "one and two way messaging", applied for in 2005. Seems to me that IRC (at a minimum) is a prior application. The larger point is, patents are now causing harm, not good. They either need massive reform, or they should be eliminated outright.
Technorati Tags: stupidity
I was ready to just call it stupid the other day - now I see that not only is it stupid, it's actually dangerous in a lot of ways. That's Congress for you - they can't limit themselves to being stupid, they have to do actual harm while they're at it.
At this point, I think the cost/benefit for both copyrights and patents have flipped. Unless both are reformed in a "start from scratch" sort of way, we'd be better off without them.
Which set of clowns over at the US PTO didn't think that this was too obvious an idea to patent:
Patent number 7,945,653 is titled Tagging digital media. If you added “with someone’s identity,” this would be one of the rare cases where the title would reasonably describe what the patent covers.
Tagging followed by an automated email is now owned by Facebook. Can we just close down the patent office now, and declare everything they've done since, oh, about 1985, invaild?
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