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Interesting Microsoft Patent Application
,----[ Quote ]
| Guardian Angel:
|
| [...]
|
| Note that Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie are co-inventers.
|
| [...]
|
| Unless there are details of the implementation in the application, it isn't
| very original; there have been many slightly different versions of this in
| science fiction literature for decades.
|
| Posted by: billswift at May 13, 2008 07:25 AM
|
| What has Bill Gates ever invented? Not sure why he would get an 'invent'
| credit on anything. Acquire acquire. Not that he's not great at exploiting
| that, but I don't know that I've really heard of anything he has invented
| himself.
|
| Posted by: jk at May 13, 2008 07:38 AM
`----
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/interesting_mic.html
Last week:
Ideas Are Everywhere... So Why Do We Limit Them?
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| Gladwell uses this to talk up what Myhrvold is doing, suggesting that
| Intellectual Ventures is really about continuing that process, getting those
| ideas out there -- but he misses the much bigger point: if these ideas are
| the natural progression, almost guaranteed to be discovered by someone sooner
| or later, why do we give a monopoly on these ideas to a single discoverer?
| Myhrvold's whole business model is about monopolizing all of these ideas and
| charging others (who may have discovered them totally independently) to
| actually do something with them. Yet, if Gladwell's premise is correct (and
| there's plenty of evidence included in the article), then Myhrvold's efforts
| shouldn't be seen as a big deal. After all, if it wasn't Myhrvold and his
| friends doing it, others would very likely come up with the same thing sooner
| or later.
|
| This is especially highlighted in one anecdote in the article, of Myhrvold
| holding a dinner with a bunch of smart people... and an attorney. The group
| spent dinner talking about a bunch of different random ideas, with no real
| goal or purpose -- just "chewing the rag" as one participant put it. But the
| next day the attorney approached them with a typewritten description of 36
| different inventions that were potentially patentable out of the dinner. When
| a random "chewing the rag" conversation turns up 36 monopolies, something is
| wrong. Those aren't inventions that deserve a monopoly.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080507/0114581051.shtml
In the Air
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| Nathan Myhrvold met Jack Horner on the set of the “Jurassic Park” sequel in
| 1996.
|
| [...]
|
| But then, in August of 2003, I.V. held its first invention session, and it
| was a revelation. “Afterward, Nathan kept saying, ‘There are so many
| inventions,’ ” Wood recalled. “He thought if we came up with a half-dozen
| good ideas it would be great, and we came up with somewhere between fifty and
| a hundred. I said to him, ‘But you had eight people in that room who are
| seasoned inventors. Weren’t you expecting a multiplier effect?’ And he
| said, ‘Yeah, but it was more than multiplicity.’ Not even Nathan had any idea
| of what it was going to be like.”
|
| The original expectation was that I.V. would file a hundred patents a year.
| Currently, it’s filing five hundred a year. It has a backlog of three
| thousand ideas.
`----
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell/?currentPage=all
U.S. appeal raises business method patent issues
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| Software companies and other businesses are watching closely as a U.S appeals
| court weighs whether an inventor can patent an abstract process -- something
| that involves nothing more than thoughts.
`----
http://www.videsignline.com/news/207601665
Bilski: Information is physical!?
,----[ Quote ]
| The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC just heard
| arguments in the Bilski case, where the appellant (Bilski) is arguing that a
| completely mental process should get a patent. The fact that this was even
| entertained demonstrates why the patent system has truly descended into new
| levels of madness. At least the PTO rejected the application; the problem is
| that the PTO now allows business method patents and software patents. Once
| they allowed them, there's no rational way to say "stop! That's rediculous!"
| without being arbitrary.
`----
http://www.dwheeler.com/blog/2008/05/09/#bilski-information-is-physical
I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Bilski!
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| Business-method patents are an unwarranted and dangerous extension of the
| patentability standards. As the article suggests, the method in question may
| have been used for many years in slightly different contexts and is now being
| transferred to a computerized system; will that now mean that the pencil and
| paper method becomes an infringing use? And if you as a lawyer advise a
| client on a tax strategy or a method of doing business, could that advice be
| a patent infringement? It is too ephemeral for a patent, and ought be knocked
| down altogether.
`----
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/05/07/i-scream-you-scream-we-all-scream-for-bilski/?mod=WSJBlog
http://tinyurl.com/5qnj3s
What I don't get about in re Bilski: Why do any financial companies support
business method patents?
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| Are there some banks that have amassed giant arsenals—the Microsoft(s) of the
| banking world? (Microsoft had less than a dozen patents before the 1998 State
| Street decision, and now has thousands, according to a former IPLB reporter
| who was inside the Microsoft war room a year ago.)
|
| Is there a giant settlement, or license agreement, or some other indicator of
| corporate behavior that would indicate why a particular financial company has
| a pro-BM patent standpoint? Who are the winners and losers of the first 10
| years of biz-meth patent war?
`----
http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2008/05/what-i-dont-get.html
Methods and madness
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| Only those inventions “worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive
| patent” should receive patent protection, declared Thomas Jefferson, himself
| an inventor and America's first commissioner of patents. Since his day some
| patents have proved to be more of an embarrassment than others. Most
| notorious are “business methods” patents, such as the patent held by
| Priceline, an online ticket agency, for the Dutch-auction method of selling
| tickets. Thousands of these patents have been issued since they were first
| recognised in 1998.
`----
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11332744
Court case could redefine business method, software patents
,----[ Quote ]
| One Free Software Foundation-backed group--aptly called the End Software
| Patents Project--is using the case as a platform to argue that no form of
| software should ever qualify for a patent. Red Hat also argued that
| the "exclusionary objectives" of software patents conflict with the nature of
| the open-source system and open up coders to myriad legal hazards.
`----
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9939515-7.html?tag=nefd.top
Related:
Who is the world's biggest patent troll?
,----[ Quote ]
| In two consecutive days, The Wall Street Journal presented two different
| answers. The first is not surprising: Intellectual Ventures, the brainchild
| of ex-Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. It's now out "to raise as much as
| $1 billion to help develop and patent inventions, many of them from
| universities in Asia."
`----
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9816163-16.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Playing Microsoft Patent Poker
,----[ Quote ]
| This time though, while Ballmer slinks away to try to con … convince people
| that Microsoft Unified Communications somehow offers people more than what
| Cisco's VOIP (voice over IP) been offering customers for years, a patent
| attack finally launches at Linux. Specifically, IP Innovation, a subsidiary
| of Acacia Technologies Group, has filed a patent infringement claim against
| Linux distributors Novell and Red Hat.
|
| So was it just timing, or was it something more? Let's take a look at the
| players.
`----
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2201579,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000616
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