On 10 Aug 2014 05:39, "Jim Lux" <jim...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> (but, I gotta say that a lot of the patents that get published in the back of things like IEEE Ant and Prop Magazine seem, to me, to be pretty obvious..) I have not looked at patents recently, but most I have looked in the past are fairly obvious to someone skilled in that area. Another large group appears to be useless things. Perhaps time-nuts should stick on a web site a list of 100 obvious things that they believe someone might just try to patent. Once an idea is disclosed like that, it should stop a patent being issued. Perhaps a braille clock with an internal atomic frequency reference. I don't suppose anyone has made one, as the demand would be low, but it is in my a opinion fairly obvious approach for a skilled person. I assume there is some time delay (probably in the range 100 us to 10s) between one observing a clock and one's brain decoding it. So for a person to believe that they know the time, the clock actually has to display it a bit fast. But more seriously, one could probably have some impact on time nut related patents by documenting semi obvious things on a web site in advance. I recall being at the patent office in London and see someone had a patent on a screen built into a microwave oven hooked upto a video camera so you could check on the security of your premises while cooking. I guess with China pretty much ignoring patents, it might become more attractive to keep something a trade secret rather than patent it. I believe Samsung and Apple have recently agreed to drop patent infringement cases against each other outside the USA http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2014/08/06/apple-and-samsung-drop-patent-disputes-against-each-other-outside-of-the-u-s/ I know BT and Marconi did a similar thing, as I guess that they realised that they were spending an excessive amount of money fighting each other over patent infringement. Dave. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
