The Mandelbear's Musings

Some good news, for once, from the front lines of the Intellectual "Property" wars:

Techdirt: Big Guns Come Out In Effort To Show RIAA's Lawsuits Are Unconstitutional.

In the past, it's been noted that the RIAA has curiously avoided suing any Harvard students, with one of the theories being that Harvard had made it quite clear to the RIAA that it would fight back hard. And, with Harvard law school at its disposal, and various professors there indicating that they had serious legal problems with the RIAA's strategy, the RIAA simply decided to ignore any file sharing going on at that prestigious university.

However, for RIAA critic and well known law professor, Charles Nesson, waiting around for the RIAA to sue someone at Harvard was getting boring, so he went out and found a case to participate in. Along with two third year law students, Nesson has hit back hard on the RIAA's efforts in a court filing, where it's noted that the very basis for many of the RIAA's lawsuits is very likely unconstitutional.

Groklaw: The Bilski Decision Is In: Buh-Bye [Most] Business Methods Patents - As text & updated 3Xs

Pop some champagne! The Appeals Court decision is in on Bilski: I'm still reading it, but on first quick reading, one thing is clear: it's a win! Eligible patent matter just got smaller. Here's a snip from the opening:

Some additional analysis on Techdirt:

I don't say this often, but it looks like the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) -- or "the patent court" -- got a big one mostly right. In the rehearing of the Bilski case concerning the patentability of software and business method patents, CAFC just came out with its ruling that will significantly limit software and business method patents, bringing the rules way back towards what they were years ago, and effectively rolling back some of the earlier, dreadful, CAFC decisions that opened the barn doors towards tons and tons of software and business method patents.

This news cheers me greatly, though not enough to make up for the jump in the interest rate on my home equity line of credit. Ouch!

(7:35 locked in a significantly lower interest rate than the one I saw on the web and panicked over. May have been a bit of an overreaction, but I'm glad I did it anyway. I'd been putting it off for too long.)

United States Patent: 7356611

Techniques for designing and processing a workflow that can be refined or modified based upon information associated with a document processed by the workflow. Since the author of the document may configure the information associated with a document that is used to determine if a workflow is to be modified, the present invention enables a document author, in addition to the workflow designer, to control processing of a document in a workflow. The documents themselves specify portions of the overall processing within a workflow net. Permissions information may be specified for the workflow and for the documents. The permissions information may specify which documents can modify the workflow, the manner in which the workflow is modified, and which documents can be processed according to the modified workflow.

I really believe that the whole idea of software patents is evil. So this kind of thing puts me roughly in the same kind of position as a vegetarian who's just invented a more efficient way of raising pigs.

*sigh*

Every couple of months our lab has a Patent Review Committee meeting to determine which of the crazy brilliant ideas we researchers have come up with in the interim are worth throwing vast quantities of expensive lawyer time at in order to turn the clear, subtle prose of our technical reports into the opaque, obfuscatory ravings of patent applications. Or something like that. All the managers are on the committee, of course, along with the other higher-ups, an outside consultant, and a lawyer. Also one token guest researcher. It's a rotating position, and I was it. In part, I suppose, because I didn't have any disclosures being evaluated this time around.

This was my second time as guest committee member; the evaluation form was recently revised, and much improved. These things always put me in a difficult moral position -- I think the patent system is broken, especially in the matter of software patents (and let's not even mention business models, user interfaces, and file formats). Oh, wait. Right.

The astute reader will note that the fact that I disapprove of software patents hasn't prevented me from acquiring ten of the despicable things. (One of those isn't strictly a software patent. But it's mostly software, so I can still feel disgusted about it.) Or keep me from evaluating other peoples' patent proposals. Fairly, I hope. Some of today's batch could actually turn out to be valuable. As for the file format and user interface, well... I understand somebody recently was issued a patent for a transportation device that, when you finally fought your way through the patent verbiage, turned out to have been the wheel. I don't think he's bothered trying to enforce it -- some little problem about prior art -- but I'll bet that plaque looks great on his wall.

The plaque hanging on my office wall goes with this one.

Anyone who believes that the US patent system is not completely broken needs to take a look at United States Patent 6,960,975: Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state.

A space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state is provided comprising a hollow superconductive shield, an inner shield, a power source, a support structure, upper and lower means for generating an electromagnetic field, and a flux modulation controller. A cooled hollow superconductive shield is energized by an electromagnetic field resulting in the quantized vortices of lattice ions projecting a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly outside the space vehicle. The spacetime curvature imbalance, the spacetime curvature being the same as gravity, provides for the space vehicle's propulsion. The space vehicle, surrounded by the spacetime anomaly, may move at a speed approaching the light-speed characteristic for the modified locale.

I would like to point out that this is an issued patent, not merely a published application, and that the application was filed March 14, 2005 -- which is amazingly fast work for the US patent office.

(From Slashdot)