On Jan 3, 10:27 am, Mark Kent <mark.k...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> > OLPC's Nigerian patent suit being waged by a man convicted of bank fraud
> > ,----[ Quote ]
> >| The Boston Globe is reporting that LANCOR, the Nigerian-owned company that
> >| has filed suit against the One Laptop Per Child project for patent
> >| infringement, is actually helmed by a man convicted of bank fraud. He spent a
> >| year in prison.
I wonder if the lawyer who defended him in the bank fraud case helped
him get the Nigerian patent.
> >http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9827611-16.html?part=rss&tag=feed&;...
> The intrusion of law-breakers into the computing world continues. After
> Microsoft, this guy is relatively small beer. When governments are
> going after him, then he'll be in the Microsoft category of
> law-breakers.
This was predicted even before they actually approved the laws
permitting software patents. The big problem with software patents is
that you have prior art going back to the 1890s, and absolutely no
formal archive of that prior art. It was predicted that since this
would be the case, criminals would fraudulently apply for patents in
partnership with unethical lawyers. With almost 100 years of prior
art in the form of algorythms that were not patentable until the law
was revised in 1994, it would be very easy to patent archiological
finds.
Ironically, there is historical precedent. The Wright brothers
studied all prior art related to flight, including the work of Otto
Lilenthiel, and Leonardo Divinci. DiVinci's "ornithopter" was
probably a glider. The problem with fixed wing gliders was that if
they were completely flat, they became unstable, rolled, and the craft
would slide into the ground. Adding a dihedral made the craft stable,
but you would have automatically drifted AWAY from any updrafts, and
INTO any downdrafts. By making it possible to change the dihedrals,
and warp the wings slightly, you could fly in stable mode by using the
dihedral, and when you hit a thermal, you could move the wings down
and warp the wings into the updraft and circle to gain altitude.
DiVinci had discovered the physics of flight control in 3 axis, and
the Wright brothers used this knowledge in their own designs,
including the use of a slight dihedral in their planes to make them
more stable, and wing warping to help tilt the plane while turning.
Even though it was the Wright brothers who patented these
technologies, it was DiVinci who created the first sail-plane. It's
quite possible that he actually had working implementations as well,
since there is an evolution in designs over time that took more that
theoretical knowledge.
Whether he himself flew them, or had a younger assistant fly them, was
probably a very well-kept secret. Who ever flew it, probably had a
photographic memory, because DiVinci was able to create many "bird's
eye view" maps of cities, towns, fortifications, and defensive systems
of enemy territory, which were used by his patrons to win battles.
It's quite possible that he was able to fly high enough to be out of
range of archers and cross-bows (at least a few thousand feet).
Floating point algorythms were documented in Egyptian artifacts in the
architect's tombs. They used an abicus which had a mantissa two
digits base 15.
If scientists could patent archeology kept secret for hundreds or
thousands of years, imagine how easy it would be to patent software
archeology that had been published over 100 years, but wasn't stored
in the patent office archives.
Patent law requires that prior art be listed in the application.
Normally, this means that a lawyer will search the patent office
archives for any previous patents, to show how the new invention is
different from those previous patents. The problem is that since
there is over 100 years of prior art generated at a time when there
were hundreds of technical publications produced every month, and
thousands of new papers and articles produced every week, and 30 years
of prior art that had been circulated via e-mail, usenet news, public
file repositories, and open source software, none of which was in the
patent office archives, it was far to easy to say they did the patent
search for prior art and found no prior art (in the patent office
archives), even though volumes of related prior art had been openly
published as Open Source software or even Public Domain software.
With that much opportunity for fraud, it was only a matter of time
before criminal lawyers started partnering with criminals, especially
computer criminals, to help them file fraudulent patents on already
published software.
Remember that about a few weeks ago, when this story first broke, I
suggested that were probably criminal elements involved because there
was so much computer fraud in Nigeria? At the time, I was accused of
being racist. The point is that if Nigeria's patent office only
requires that the Nigerian patent archive be searched for prior art,
Nigeria could turn into a hotbed for fraudulent patent applications.
This is why companies like IBM are filing what they call "High
Quality" patent applications. In these patent applications, they are
listing as much prior art as possible. With IBM filing several
thousand applications every year, and only being granted a fraction of
those patents (because the others could obviously be derived from
prior art), even the rejected patent applications become a permanent
part of the patent office archive. The Open Patent project is doing
similar things, filing patent applications which list lots of prior
art, making it harder for criminals to file fraudulent patents by
claiming prior art as their own inventions.
Many Linux distributors are also filing similar "high quality" patents
applications, primarily as a defensive measure. The problem, for
companies like Microsoft, is when some of these patents are granted,
and they cover technology which Microsoft uses, in a similar form.
Microsoft has recently been sued by a few shady companies who have
filed "low quality" fraudulent patent applications, were granted the
patents, and then tried to sue Microsoft for a rediculous amount of
money.
One of the reasons that the patent office originally decided not to
grant patents for software was because it was so easy to take a
"claim", the specification of the devices purpose and usefulness, and
generate 30 different implementations, all of which could be
intuitively derived from the claim, by even high school students. It
was not uncommon for a teacher to give a class a public specification,
such as an IETF specification, or a government contract specification,
and have each member of the class implement a program that satisfied
that specification. Initially, it might be a small and simple
specification like IP packet routing. Later it could be something
more complex like a parser for a language like C.
Paul Allen and Bill Gates were undergraduates and dropped out of
college when they created BASIC, a software emulater of an 8080, and
most of the software that was responsible for the creation of
Microsoft.
Bill Joy was an undergraduate when he invented Sockets, the VI editor,
and termcap. Much of BSD 4.0 was created by undergraduates working on
class projects based on the Version 6 functional descriptions.
Software patents are of questionable value when it comes to enforcing
them. Often, a plaintiff is hoping to gain the sympathy of a jury.
The problem is that before jury hears anything, a judge has to make a
bunch of preliminary rulings as to what they can or cannot hear.
Before that, the defendent gets to request disclosures of all
information related to the patent in question, and is required to
present all of the information they have related to how they generated
the supposedly infringing patent. It is often during this process
that a bunch of prior art begins to surface, prior art that wasn't
mentioned in the patent application, and should have been listed.
Very often, it is during those preliminary discovery and preliminary
ruling hearings that patents can be nullified, revoked, or even
declared fraudulent.
Even if the patent is ruled to be valid, it might be for a very small
snippet of code, often just a few hundred lines of code. But the
system in which it is being used might be even a billion or more lines
of code and documentation. If, in a competitive market, the vendor is
only able to collect a certain amount, say $50 per copy, and the
plaintiff is asking for a rediculous amount, say $700 per copy, then
it's pretty easy to guess that the next round of hearings will be to
put the value of the plaintiff's patent into perspective.
The plaintiff, of course will try to make a case for his pricing,
perhaps by showing that he has sold a few hundred, or even a few
thousand copies at his price, and that the infringement is making it
impossible for him to continue to get that price. The defendent, on
the other hand, will point out that he was able to sell many more,
perhaps millions of devices, but only at a price which was competitive
with the rest of the industry. In many cases, the judge may even
issue preliminary rulings as to which arguments can be used in front
of the Jury. For example, if it turns out that those 1,000 copies
were sold to your uncle, on credit, for 100 times the price charged by
the defendent, and your uncle hasn't paid the loan, then he might rule
that this is not a completed transaction.
There may also be a round of disclosure hearings surrounding the sales
at the higher prices. If it turns out that the purchases were made as
a result of coercion, such as extortion, blackmail, or fraud, there is
a possibility that the judge could issue a preliminary ruling that the
pricing argument of the plaintiff can't be presented to the jury.
Worse, the Judge could allow the argument (at the request of the
defendent) so long as the full story of the criminal pressures brought
to bear, can also be presented at trial (not exactly the thing you
want the jury to hear). Often, the judge can also rule that
nondisclosure agreements related to these sales are obstruction of
justice, which means that they are no longer binding, and the
witnesses can say anything they want during interviews, investigation,
depositions, and testimony, and all of their testimony can be made
part of the public domain court record.
Normally, if all of this gets sorted out, there is a point where the
defendent may still decide that it's cheaper to just settle, rather
than risk getting a hostile jury. Often, they will offer a reasonable
amount to make it go away, but it might be less than 1% or even 1% of
1% of what the plaintiff originally demanded. Even then, the terms
are usually undisclosed, and often, the plaintiff forfeits all future
claims, or even signs over the patents in question.
If the case ever does get before a jury, it's a crap shoot. If the
plaintiff wins, he could get everything he asked for, or he could get
"the smallest coin in the realm". If the jury finds that the claim is
without merit, and sides with the defendent, the defendent can recover
all legal fees, and even money for "damage to brand", and can go after
all "sponsors" of the patent in question. In some cases, the judge
can even order that all financial records of the defendent, AND his
council, be disclosed, to help the defendent recover those costs and
damages. This is one of the reasons that you don't see companies like
IBM suing lots of companies for patent infringement.
Normally, patents are traded. Companies will exchange patents with
each other to get the largest possible patent "umbrella". The point
is that by cross-licensing each other's patents, and paying for them
with patent licenses, it becomes much harder for a fraudulent patent
applicant to claim that his patent was simply stolen. If a company
has a record of dealing with other patent holders in good faith, it's
much harder to claim that they simply refused to address your
reasonable claim. Either they felt your claim was fraudulent, or they
felt your demands for the license was unreasonable. If you demanded
cash, it makes your claim less credible.
On the other hand, if you are willing to trade patents, to cross-
license each other's patents, it means that you are either in a
similar business, or could do business with someone who is. This
would tend to make you look less like someone who just cooked up an
idea on your kitchen table, coded it up in a few hours, then had a
lawyer help you pump up the value by selling a license for a few
hundred units to a relative or friend, on credit, to make the
invention look like it's worth a rediculous amount of money, then file
a suit demanding triple damages for infringement of a patent that the
defendent didn't even know about (because it hasn't actually been used
in a product).
Many people think that software copyrights or patents are some sort of
"cornicopia". They imagine that if they patent some idea, they will
instantly be able to collect $millions, or even $billions, from some
big company like IBM, just because they had this brilliant idea.
What they don't understand is that ideas, even patented ideas, are of
very little value unless somebody turns those ideas into a useful
product, and gets it into the hands of millions of people.
The streets of New York or filled with designers who want to be the
next Donna Koran, or Gucci, but they learn quickly that DK and Gucci
don't need the design. What makes them big name designers is that
they can take that idea, make it easy to manufacture, make it
affordable, get it into the stores, and pick the right designs that
people will want to purchase when they get to the store.
Steven Spielberg understood, even with American Grafitti, that he had
to make a profit on the movie, not just make a great movie. He used
mostly unknown actors, the script was simple, the scenes were simple,
and the story was something that baby boomers could relate to at the
time. They could see what life was like for their parents when their
parents were that age. The movie itself wasn't even a cinimatic
masterpiece, but it had a shoestring budget, and made a lot of money
very quickly.
Bill Gates understood, that it wasn't enough to just have a great
computer. He understood that the computer had to be simple,
affordable, easy to use, and it had to do things that people already
did every day. People needed to balance their budgets, balance their
checkbooks, write letters to friends, and maybe publish the church
newsletter.
The Apple Lisa was a much better computer, but it was also very
expensive. It was artistic, but it was also complex. It was easy to
use, but it didn't do the things that people usually do. The same was
true of the Sun workstation, which was also a better computer, but was
expensive, and did a lot of things that were only done by highly
skilled engineers for very large companies.
The Internet was a good idea, but as a research network it had little
value to the average user. The challenge was to make it a tool to do
things that people already did, but quicker and more easily. They
read the paper, so getting publishers was a good idea, but publishers
needed to get advertizers to pay for the content. The advertisers
wanted to sell products. I can tell you almost to the day, the
turning point in the commercialization of the internet. It was when
newspaper and magazine publishers realized that when an internet user
followed a link, they weren't just getting a few column inches of
information, they were being directed to an entire catalog provided by
the advertizer.
Almost overnight, the price of links on strategic pages of major on-
line publications went from a few dollars per link, to several
thousand dollars per link. Often, links in less strategic locations
were priced on a "per view" and per "follow-up" basis. When ads were
closely related to content in terms of interest and subject matter,
publishers and advertizers alike found that these ads were very
effective, more effective than newspapers or television, because
someone looking for a product could search for information about that
product, follow a link to a merchant who sold that product, and place
an order, often within a few minutes. This would have been about the
middle of 1994.
Ironically, Bill Gates missed this, and had dismissed the internet as
a fad, and was planning is own exclusive dial-up service, similar to
AOL or Prodigy. Users would dial up, the only content they would see
would be controlled by Microsoft, and advertizers and publishers alike
would have to pay Microsoft as much as 85% of their ad revenues (like
they did with AOL).
When Microsoft turned their back, and Trumpet Winsock and Mosaic
browser, both of which could fit on a single floppy, could be
installed in less than 30 minutes, the floodgates were open. To make
it more interesting yet, thousands of BBS operators who had been
running FIDO or WildCat BBS systems on little 80386 or 80486 PCs
learned that they could put Linux on those computers, get a connection
to a UNIX server using a dial-up or dedicated line, and have users
dialing in and paying as much as $30 per month for dial-up service.
The key was that internet users using web browsers actually paid their
bill. With Linux, if they didn't pay their bill, their account could
be blocked, or they could be given a message that told them to pay the
bill. It became a balancing act, with customers paying $30/month for
local dial-up access, and phone lines costing about $15/month, it
became easy to expand and upgrade both sides of the connection. If
you couldn't get directly to the internet, you could often pay another
access provider for a bigger pipe, and get access that way. Soon,
supernets were linking every lata so that local dial-up service was
available in every LATA (it took over 500 such sites to service all of
New Jersey.
Many of these supernets became large businesses, and many merged into
very large corporations which offered hosting services as well as
access. Soon companies like AOL, Prodigy, and Comuserve were coming
to these dial-up service providers, called POPs, to connect their
users via the Internet. By the middle of 1995, there were pops all
over the country, most of whom also offered hosting services, and all
of them interconnected via the MCI Internet Backbone. MCI worked with
Sprint, AT&T, and other carriers to help them provide better high
speed services to both the POPs and to corporate customers, who soon
had employees using the internet the way they used to use the
corporate library.
The idea was very simple, get people to read the paper over the
Internet, and make it so they could buy stuff they were reading
about. The implementation took the resources of MCI, Dow Jones, Mc-
Graw Hill, Ziff-Davis, Morgan Stanley, Prudential, Sprint, Yahoo,
Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, and about 7,000 other companies to
implement. If I had tried, in 1992, to patent this wonderful idea,
and demand 25% of the royalties from every advertizer, every
publisher, every POP, and every web hosting company, I wouldn't have
been rich, and they would have gone elsewhere. Instead, all I asked,
and not even by contract, was that they take 1/10th of 1% of any
revenue they made after their first $million in profits, and
contribute it to an Open Source project.
I wasn't being philanthropic, I was being practical. The Internet,
and most of it's supporting technology was the result of hundreds of
Open Source projects. I had no idea how to manage distribution
fairly, and I didn't want to be saddled with the responsibilities and
duties of that distribution. At the same time, I only felt that it
was fair that if these people were the key contributors to a
technology which I knew could be generating over $1 trillion in
revenues for companies all over the world, that they should get some
of that mony back.
So, when I was sending hundreds of pagest per month to that
publisher's mailing list, helping them set up those BBS/POPs, helping
them devise revenue models, demographics, and technologies, I didn't
ask for personal gain, I asked that they give back to those who had
made all of this possible. I didn't make an unreasonable request, I
just picked a number which reflected what experience had taught me was
the typical value of such an invention.
I did OK too. I had offers from dozens of companies who wanted to
hire me, including Netscape, several publishers, Sun, even Microsoft.
I chose the companies I chose because I didn't want to limit myself to
one dimension of the industry. I didn't just want to take one niche
and make a $milllion for myself, I wanted to be of maximum services to
all of humanity. How could we get computers into the hands of the
poor, of people in 3rd world countries, and how could we generate
global economic growth in which nobody had to suffer due to scarcity.
My goal was to created global economic abundance, to give people
personal and individual freedom, and to give them the power to create
their own economic opportunity.
This is why I have worked so hard for the acceptance of Linux and Open
Source Software all these years. I had read Bill Gate's World
Domination speech, and saw the personal freedom and personal power of
every individual threatened. Gates really would be "Big Brother", and
it wouldn't be long before his total control of information, his
"thought police", were enslaving the world's populations, including
Americans, in fear of being branded "terrorists", or being sentanced
to death by denial of medical treatment.
When I was 17 years old, I was on the board of directors at my church
(an Elder on the session of a Presbyterian church), I had been a
Deacon as well. I learned that leaders are trusted servants of those
they serve. Later, I joined AA and NA and even took on leadership
roles, again as a trusted servant responsible to those I served.
When I became a manager, I served everybody, the client, my staff, and
my employer, balancing the interests of all, and doing what was best
for everybody in the long run. I saved the customer several million
dollars, got my staff placed in even better assignments or positions,
and helped my employer gain a reputation for producing extraordinary
results.
When I moved into upper management, I was again the servant, and it
enabled me to get 25 other companies to dedicate teams of 10-20 people
each, to produce results, not for me, but for themselves. My employer
was able to open up huge new markets and generate a huge amount more
revenue, and at vastly increased profit margins, not because I was
forcing these companies to do my will, but because I was serving all
of those I was leading.
When I took this same leadership tactic to a mailing list of
publishers, I started out with only 40 publishers, and most were only
technical managers. Within a years, I had over 1000 companies, often
dedicating teams of 10 or more, to the commercialization of the
internet, and within 4 years, the number had grown to 7,000, many of
whom were corporate executives and editors, who were dedicating
$millions to the commercialization of the internet. And all this
time, I led them, as a trusted servant, helping them to realize their
dreams.
I was a leader, but, I was not a general or a dictator. A leader says
"lets go this way", and for whatever reason, a bunch of people
follow. A soldier will march to his death, because it's his duty to
die, but he also known that it is his duty to destroy enemy weapons
which will kill the others on his side. A corporate executive,
offered the opportunity to make huge amounts of revenue with very
little cost, due to Open Source and Open Standards used on the
Internet, when all that is being requested in return is 1/10th of 1%
of the revenue (when he's getting 20% or more in profit), tends to
make that executive want to follow.
And when the US market has been saturated, and large corporations are
looking for new avenues of growth, giving them the opportunity to
bring their products and services from a population of 300 million
people to a market of 6 billion people, is something that makes them
want to follow. And giving that 6 billion people the means to be
productive and pay fairly for those products, tends to make even the
communist and socialist leaders listen.
You can't force someone to become more productive. But if you give
them the means to become more productive, and show him, and his
community that by being more productive, they can have more than just
subsistance, they can even enjoy safe comfortable lives, and you can
deliver on that promise, by helping them to sell products to western
economies and those who have the means to pay a fair price (e-bay),
they will follow, because you are serving them. They will switch from
destructive activities to productive activities.
The key is that leaders are trusted servants, whose power comes from
those they serve. The power comes from the individual, and is granted
to the leaders. Force isn't leadership, it isn't even power, it's
terror. When given a choice between a power and terror, individuals
will choose power over terror. We don't see blacks rioting in the
streets anymore, because they now have power. There are black
Republicans who see that they can be judged by the quality of their
character today, not the color of their skin. They have chosen to
become productive, and the have chosen to become leaders. And this
gives them power, including the power to generate leaders, and to lead
others by serving them.
Rex Ballard
http://www.open4success.org
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