| filed a motion to permanently stop Microsoft distributing Internet Explorer browsers that infringe the patent
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Posted on 10/13/2003 2:27:23 PM PDT by NotQuiteCricket
Twenty distinct times? I would be very surprised.
Until the 1976 Copyright Act, copyrights were 28 initial, renewable for an additional 28. I believe the 28+28 was an extension of 28+14. I don't know how many times copyright had been extended to reach the 28+14 standard, but I'd be surprised if it was more than half a dozen.
The 1976 Copyright Act extended copyrights to life+50 for authored works, or 75 years for works-for-hire; the Bono Perpetual Copyright act amended those limits to life+70 and 95 years, respectively.
What other copyright extensions have there been?
You and Jesse Jackson would be good buddies, you both agree on "Mend it don't end it" when it lines your pocket.
That is an unwarranted ad hominem attack, and a gross and false distortion of my position. Are you so unsure of the soundness of your own position that that's the best that you can muster as an "argument"?
Goodbye and good riddance.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
- Thomas Jefferson
Indeed. From this point on, only a specific implementation of an idea should be allowed. That means you can own how you put your product together, it doesn't mean you can own the technology behind it. Microsoft would be free to maintain exclusive rights to their implementations and if you created an implementation identical to theirs you would be liable, but if yours is an interoperable product then you'd be in the clear. What I mean simply is that they could own the exact implementation of how they decode Windows Media, but not prevent other MPEG4 vendors from adding support through different implementations of Windows Media that don't follow the exact same procedure to decode.
And the up side about that for Microsoft is that they could legally copy any of Apple's technologies so long as they did their own clean implementations of them.
If the patent office were to adhere to the proper standards, we would not be plagued with so many ridiculous patents. Specifically I am referring to the concepts of novelty and non-obviousness - the patents that are most often held up for ridicule are the ones that fail those statutory tests, and the patents should never have been issued.
Doing away with patent protection for really novel and non-obvious ideas, however, would simply be giving in to communist goals, where there are no protections for private property (intellectual or othewise). The ramifications would be harmful, and not just to the inventors and their lawyers.
I take it you missed the point of that Jefferson quote. Our founders were highly skeptical of the ethical nature of "owning an idea." The problem with "owning an idea" is that you can never have exclusive ownership of it in a real property sense and your use of it does not diminish if someone else knows it as well. And then there's the undeniable fact that all ideas build off of other ideas. Ideas don't come out of a vacuum.
At this point weakening the patent laws would help our economy, especially in the tech industries. Allowing companies to write software free of all concerns of patent laws would make for some very vigorous competition which would be beneficial to all of us.
In that text, he also says that "It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it" which is, in fact, an underpinning of the Communist belief system. Would you argue, then, against individual ownership of tangible property as strongly as you are arguing against ownership of intellectual property?
If you go on to read the entire statement, then it should be clear to you that Jefferson's proposition is not that patents should not be granted for an idea - rather it is just the opposite, namely that even though nature is constructed such that nobody truly "owns" any property, the laws of man can be constructed to establish such rights, because of the benefits that they bring to humanity.
Jefferson's point is that "Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society". So, he is debating the difference between natural law and social law. And the quote that you have used actually supports granting patents for novel ideas, it is not against that practice, because patents are a construct of "social law", and only the more advanced societies have reached the state where things such as private property are recognized in that law, which in Jefferson's mind (and mine, too) equates to social progress.
I am serious when I say that Microsoft should be able to copy Apple's ideas without compensation. If they can build on them in a better way, which they haven't thus far, but if they can then they should be able to without paying a dime to Apple. It should be a free for all in the software industry. I have no problem with Creative owning an exclusive right to the Emu10K1 chipset used in the Audigy cards. I do have a problem with someone else not being able to take some of their ideas and building an even better sound card. Just because you invented the mouse trap shouldn't give you the ability to stop others from building a better one.
Yeah, this is a royal pain in the butt. It's not just the browser makers that have to worry about this, it's everybody who maintains a web site that is even the least bit complicated.
Microsoft will sooner or later put out a rev. of IE that will basically break almost every commercial web page out there. On the day that comes out, every site that uses Flash or virtually any Active X technology has to be ready to do a new handshake. Otherwise the user gets hit with one of those "Is this OK?" dialogs for every little gizmo in there. A page like CNN's probably has 10 Flash ads on it... imagine every time you go there, you get hit with 10 little boxes to click, one after the other, asking if it's OK.
Getting ready for this is probably costing the industry as a whole hundreds of millions of dollars.
I wish Mr. Berners-Lee well in his quest. This is one of those stupid patents that never should have been issued. The basic concept of mixing data and instruction in the comm stream goes back to at least the IBM 3270 of thirty years ago. Moving that concept to the web was obvious to anyone skilled in the art.
| filed a motion to permanently stop Microsoft distributing Internet Explorer browsers that infringe the patent
|
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I don't think they will get this. Or if they do, it will be quashed quickly by some appeals court. Such an order would effectively halt PC shipments. Dell and HP would be ruined by it. Intel and AMD would be next, along with a lot of retailers. There are monetary remedies available to the court that do not severely punish innocent third parties.