Hsuan-yeh, On Mon, Oct 03, 2011 at 09:56:36PM -0400, Hsuanyeh Chang wrote: > If I have the honor, what I can offer now is to write up, in the > name of BLU, a "request for ex parte reexamination" and get it on > file in the patent office in an attempt to invalidate the asserted > patent(s). But, I would need support from the BLU (e.g., knowledge > and time to find prior art, official fees to be paid to the patent > office, and other costs). Would anyone be willing to take action > together?
My reading of the material posted on this patent was that it was rejected, I thought. But even if it's not, I think you're really missing the point. I argued with a friend of mine about this several years ago... You may or may not appreciate the analogy I used with him (he didn't, though I did eventually win him over to my opinion anyway). A computer is a machine, like a player piano. It is made up of millions of tiny switches, not unlike the keys of the piano, either off or on (at rest or depressed), except much smaller, and lots more of them. Software is like a document that describes the state of all the switches of the computer, which gets fed through it, like the cards that feed the player piano. Do you think a particular card describing some particular song should be patentable? I'm sure that sounds ridiculous, but it's not really that different with computers: When you write software, you're only telling the computer to do something it was already designed to do!!! The only difference is that the computer is a general purpose machine that was designed to be able to input, process and display information in a generalized way. The magic was already invented... it's the computer itself. Whatever else you do with it is just the card that tells your player piano what to play. By and large, with rare exception, there's nothing inventive about it. And even when there is, you're essentially trying to patent a peice of math or logic, which we all know the patent system doesn't allow. Unless it's software, that is. As with most analogies, my player piano analogy is not without flaws, but I think it's fair enough to illustrate the point. Your solution to this problem is for us all to patent our own "inventions" -- and right there in quotes is the problem. None of this stuff is inventive at all, for the most part, so we don't know what to patent. Choosing what to patent is very important, given our extremely limited budget. And the megacorps already have hundreds of thousands of patents, so chances are they already have one filed that covers what we're imagining. The expense is great, and the value of our contribution is minimal, if anything. There's strong disincentive. As you can see from the attitudes here, we already feel that the cards are stacked strongly against us, so there's a sense of futility. Microsoft and others have already proved their willingness to engage in (or at least support financially) long, drawn-out legal battles against anything that benefits either open-source software or any sort of little guy who won't play ball with them. If some organization did arise for the purpose of collecting a patent portfolio to use for cross-licensing purposes, or even just to file them for prior art, I fully expect that they would be litigated into oblivion by those megacorps, who would, in all likelihood, become the owners of whatever patent rights the organization managed to accumulate, since that would be the only thing of value left once the money ran out. That's the worst possible outcome. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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