A games and economic theory argument against intellectual property. Watt's on first in academic paper.
posted on Jun 21, 2007 - View this thread

The end of one-click patents? The Supreme court recently handed down a decision in the case of KSR v. Teleflex requiring courts to use "common sense" in determining what is an is not "Obvious" and therefore not patentable. According to SCOTUSblog, this will greatly affect "combination" patents that involve combining two already existing ideas in a new way.
posted on May 9, 2007 - View this thread

Google Patent Search can be a gold mine for a historical trivia. See the design for bucket seats patented by Steve McQueen, the secret communication system co-created by Hedy Lamarr that paved the way for the frequency hopping used by modern cell phones, the disposable infant garment made by Jamie Lee Curtis, the interactive music generation system made by Thomas Dolby of "She Blinded Me With Science" fame, and other unusual celebrity patents made by inventors that range from Abraham Lincoln to Zeppo Marx.
posted on Apr 7, 2007 - View this thread

Yoshiro Nakamatsu aka Dr. NakaMats has invented everything, other than all the other stuff that the rest of us have invented. He has 3218 patents to his name. (Edison had 1093.) Among his many inventions? The compact disc, the compact disc player ('natch), the digital watch, a unique golf putter, the floppy disk (!), and a water-powered engine. Besides being the founder of the World Genius Convention (where the world first learned of ingenuity of ADR ceramic disks, for instance), Dr. NakaMats was voted by the US Science Academic Society as one of five greatest scientists in history - in the company of Archimedes, Michael Faraday, Marie Curie, and Nikola Tesla - and he plans to live until 144!
posted on Feb 23, 2007 - View this thread

Math gets a patent.
"The field of invention relates generally to performing division operations using processing components and, more specifically but not exclusively relates to techniques for performing efficient software-based integer division using reciprocal multiplication."
posted on Jul 13, 2006 - View this thread

Was U.S. Patent Number 7,000,000 reserved for DuPont? The USPTO issues utility patents every Tuesday. Patent numbers are normally assigned sequentially first to the week's general and mechanical inventions, next to chemical inventions , and finally to electrical inventions. In the Official Gazette (OG) published on February 14th, there was gap in the list of the list of electrical patents where the patent number 7,000,000 was supposed to be. And at the very end of the list of chemical patents you find U.S. Patent 7,000,000 assigned to E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company of Wilmington, Delaware. Just random chance, I wonder, or perhaps just another indication of the ability of corporations to influence U.S. government agencies?
posted on Feb 28, 2006 - View this thread

Can you patent a plot? On Tuesday, the USPTO published an application for patent that is certain to test the limits of the USPTO's authority to grant or deny a patent. It is also an interesting exercise in self-promotion. U.S. Patent Application 20050244804 entitled "Process of relaying a story having a unique plot" is the brainchild of Andrew Knight, a registered U.S. Patent Agent. Mr. Knight is a principle in Knight and Associates a patent attorney firm who bill themselves as "[...] the first patent prosecution firm to attempt to obtain utility patent protection on fictional plots." Forbes Magazine described them as box office patents. It is part serious attempt, part parody on the wobbly state of the patent system and the entertainment industry, and part shameless act of self promotion. Very rock and roll.
posted on Nov 3, 2005 - View this thread

Taiwan ignores drug patent - To save its people from a dangerous flu, Taiwan is synthesizing a vaccine without permission. This bears a striking resemblance to a classic moral dilemma of Kohlberg's stages of moral development. Kohlberg's theory is not without criticism, including gender bias, Western-centric thinking, and external validity. Simply knowing a person's decision doesn't tell you about their stage of development; you have to know the reasoning behind it, which is hard to come by in real world situations. Conversely, knowing a person's stage of moral development (even harder to come by in the real world) does not reliably predict their decision (moreso at the higher levels). Nor does Kohlberg's theory scale to what choices societies themselves make. Decision Making is a booming field of research, but how much research is being done on morality and group decision making? Not much. (initial article via /.)
posted on Oct 22, 2005 - View this thread

Patent Room is a collection of early 20th Century industrial design culled from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office, featuring architecture, automobiles, toys, and trains.
posted on Aug 3, 2005 - View this thread

European Parliament rejects software patenting ..and by a large politically crushing majority of 648 votes vs 14. This is a great measurable success for organization like Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure whose members, supporters and sympathizers have fought against the insane idea of software patent for more then four years (more info on euro software patents on the organization site).
posted on Jul 6, 2005 - View this thread

BIOS-Biological Innovation for Open Society is an open source biotechnology initiative based in Australia. Along with its parent organization CAMBIA, it aims to foster a "protected commons" for scientific information and technology. Tools and techniques are shared, and can be improved and repackaged, just like in open source software.
posted on Mar 4, 2005 - View this thread

U.S. Denies Patent for a Too-Human Hybrid - what happens when your DNA violates a patent? Not sure where to begin on this one.
posted on Feb 13, 2005 - View this thread

IBM to give away 500 patents. Curiouser and curiouser. Why now? And, what patents? IBM makes a great deal of money licensing their patent portfolio - is this meant to stimulate additional licensing? How does this fit in with the open source movement? In other news, IBM just received the go-ahead to sell off their PC unit to a firm that just won a rather large contract to provide PCs in China.
posted on Jan 11, 2005 - View this thread

Jesus Boots perfected! NYT: In the last 150 years, Americans have patented about 100 water-walking inventions. The first, in 1858, was by H. R. Rowlands, who lived in Boston, not far from where Mr. Rosen resides, in Newton, Mass. Most of the subsequent patents, Mr. Rosen said, are iterations of that same idea. "Unfortunately," Mr. Rosen observed, "none of them actually work."
posted on Aug 3, 2004 - View this thread

The New Yorker's James Surowiecki writes about patent creep. With eBay losing one court case and being threatened by another, Spike Lee trying to stop his first name being used, Amazon owning the concept of threaded discussions, the never-ending Un*x wars, and bands trying to protect certain chord progressions (OK that one's a hoax), is this a worrying pattern that needs to be reversed, and is it just the beginning of an anti-competitive trend that will see our own genes being patented?
posted on Jul 17, 2003 - View this thread

A gallery of obscure patents.
Bird diapers, a motorized ice cream cone and an apparatus for simulating a "high five" are among the treasures unearthed by delphion's gallery of incredible but real US patents.
See also their gallery of historic patents, featuring, among others, the patent for the hypodermic syringe (1843).
posted on Jun 27, 2003 - View this thread

You Can Patent That? (including Wrigley Chews Over Idea of Viagra Gum)
more: Online Newspapers; Online Auctions; Method of Exercising a Cat; 2 PCs in one; GIF is dead.
posted on Jun 19, 2003 - View this thread

Jeff Bezos has patented the idea for "A method and system for conducting an electronic discussion relating to a topic." Clearly, an idea way ahead of its time... (via somebodydial911)
posted on Feb 26, 2003 - View this thread

Evil SBC acts like bully going after small sites with an absurd patent. If you've ever designed a web site with "selectors or tabs that... seem to reside in their own frame or part of the user interface" such as Metafilter's header or Amazon's tabs or c|net's yellow side bar, then your design is in violation of SBC Communication's patent number 5,933,841. Here's the abstract:

A structured document browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized according to a pre-defined structure. The structured document browser displays documents that have been marked with embedded codes that specify the structure of the document. The tags are mapped to correspond to a set of icons. When the icon is selected while browsing a document, the browser will display the section of the structure corresponding to the icon selected, while preserving the constant user interface.

Armed with this patent SBC is going after web sites with a licensing fee of $100,000 to $16,000,000. Will this insanity ever stop?
via Jarle's Cyberspace
posted on Jan 21, 2003 - View this thread

AOL owns Instant Messaging? - MSNBC is reporting that AOL's subsidary ICQ has received a patent for Instant Messaging. I would have thought IRC was enough prior art to invalidate the claim, but the Patent Office knows best. Can AOL put the genie back in the bottle?
posted on Dec 18, 2002 - View this thread

Scientists do have senses of humor. Also, funny science cartoons appeal to many of us, like this one or this . Whacky patents also delight the mind and tickle the funny bone. Absurd humor makes us wonder what the heck is going on. And what the hell is Chindogu really all about? What are you favorite science sites with humor or absurdity?
posted on Nov 14, 2002 - View this thread

EBay in patent dispute. EBay is currently involved in a patent dispute with someone who claims to have patented the idea of online auctions in 1995. EBay believes it has found prior art in a USENET post from 1994.
posted on Sep 30, 2002 - View this thread

More good mp3 news. Thomson Multimedia is now requiring patent payments for MP3 decoders as well as encoders.
posted on Aug 27, 2002 - View this thread

U.S. claims Canada's greatest invention. Congress awards creation of telephone to Italian inventor living in New York. Uh oh. Canada's inferiority complex takes another blow.

"Bell was either a thief, a fraud, or extraordinarily lucky."
posted on Jun 22, 2002 - View this thread

Are you infringing this patent? Please make sure that you (or your 10-year-old nephew) aren't.
posted on Apr 10, 2002 - View this thread

License for love. Although some might call it a license for stalking. This is a patent for a method to request a date with a someone knowing only their vehicle license plate number. Quite a concept. I wonder what Mr. Wertheim will name this service.
posted on Jan 28, 2002 - View this thread

HTML code patented. Thanks to Unicast and your friends in the US patent office. "Unicast's second patent, No. 6,314,451, covers the method of serving Internet ads using HTML code that, when downloaded by a Web browser, can be used to begin downloading dynamically- produced content." It also seems that they are ready to get sue-happy.
posted on Dec 3, 2001 - View this thread

What you get when you type "something strange and different" into Google Am I the only person who bangs random words into Google to see what comes back? In this case I feel rewarded - bizarre patents from around the world. What's your favourite Google query string?
posted on Oct 26, 2001 - View this thread

The W3C's RAND Patent Policy commenting deadline has been extended. At first glance, the new policies seem to encourage software patents, but after reading the whole thing and the W3C's response to current comments, it looks, to my admittedly naive eyes, as though the W3C is trying to make it so that companies using proprietary software are going to have to make it available to other people for licensing. Why is this new structure potentially a bad thing?
posted on Oct 2, 2001 - View this thread

You know Jakob Nielsen's old saying "users don't scroll?" Maybe it's because you'd be violating his patent if you did. You got mail? Nope, that's also Jakob's patent. When was the last time this site updated? Again, don't ask or you could owe Jakob. Did I misspell anything in this post? Don't hit the spellcheck button, or it's violation time again. And that's just the tip of the scary patent iceberg. Is it a good idea for Jakob to have all these patents on basic internet application functions?
posted on Sep 28, 2001 - View this thread

US drug patients vs. the world in AIDS crisis. Brazil is making generic AIDS medicine based upon existing drugs created (and of course patented) by US drug companies. the catch? they are giving the drugs away FOR FREE. US Drug companies want their money. the UN agreed ,52 in favor and 1 not in favor, for brazil's strategy for dealing with the AIDS crisis. guess who opposed.
posted on May 31, 2001 - View this thread

Free Market Failure?
The pharmaceutical companies profits have been rising faster than the S&P Industrials as a whole, mainly due to huge profits from drug patents. Not only are the drug companies milking American consumers, but their stranglehold on IP rights to new drugs prevents much-needed medicines from being affordable in many third-world countries. But, we can't take away patent rights or investors would flee the drug scene and new drugs wouldn't be developed at all. How do we solve this problem? The only institutions with the financial resources to do the same research as drug companies are national governments. And they have the obligation to protect the social welfare. Should we turn over pharmaceutical research and development to government?
posted on Mar 27, 2001 - View this thread

Microsoft Patents Everything! Oh dear lord, what will we do now? Has Mr. Gates finally found a way to take over the world?
posted on Mar 26, 2001 - View this thread

Amazon can't patent 1-Click after all Finally somebody realizes the obvious; now if they can get BT to give up on patenting hyperlinks we can all go back to enjoying the Internet.
posted on Feb 15, 2001 - View this thread

Kill a patent, make a bundle. This is one of the more creative uses of the web to date. A new kind of matchmaker, actually. Patents are a common source of litigation and often a company accused of violating a patent wants to prove that the patent is invalid. The easiest way to do that is to find "prior art", to prove that the invention described by the patent actually existed elsewhere before the owner of the patent filed for it. So this web site offers prizes ($10,000!) for leads to prior art in specific cases. Those offering the prizes are anonymous, though it's often possible to figure out who they are just by the questions they ask if you have a knowledge of disputes in the industry.
posted on Feb 3, 2001 - View this thread

Altavista to become only search engine
Not really, but they do plan on enforcing several search-related patents that they have, hoping to increase revenue by extorting other search companies. "We believe that virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents.... If you index a distributed set of databases - what the Internet is - and even within intranets, corporations, that's one of the patents," says CMGI CEO David Wetherell.
posted on Jan 18, 2001 - View this thread

The ethical problems of biotech patents have been noted here before. Now the New Scientist reports that those patent applications are on the brink of crippling the world wide patent system to the detriment of real inventions and to the disadvantage of poorer countries (and what is the PC term for those now that 'third world' and even 'less developed countries' have fallen out of favor?)
posted on Dec 12, 2000 - View this thread

One word: Creepy. (Note that IBM doesn't actually own this patent -- they just run the patent lookup service.) Props to Victor.
posted on Oct 5, 2000 - View this thread

FLASH! Sanity breaks out in Congress! Doesn't sound like grandstanding to me; sounds like these guys have a clue on software and business method patents. "Healthy skepticism" sound like real friendly words to me.
posted on Oct 4, 2000 - View this thread

And you thought that europe was relatively patent-sane... Advogato is carrying an interesting article on the EU patent office planning to allow patents on anything, instead of the current no algorithms, no blah, no foo policy. (Fill in blah and foo for yourself, I can't think of anything).
posted on Aug 20, 2000 - View this thread

Adobe sues Macromedia over infringement of their patented tabbed palettes.
"Adobe filed a lawsuit against Macromedia® alleging infringement of our intellectual property, specifically our patented tabbed palette, which is a key user interface element and method invented by Adobe and incorporated into our products."
posted on Aug 10, 2000 - View this thread

Well, we're all screwed. Seems like BT patented hyperlinking years ago, and they plan to aggressively enforce it in the US. Anyone know how to setup blogger for gopher? (free registration is required to view article)
posted on Jun 19, 2000 - View this thread

Oh, cool; someone patented banner ads! And they're suing everyone else for using them. (Ok, so they really only patented *offline* banner ads; we could *hope*, right? :-)
posted on Jun 15, 2000 - View this thread

Amazon is approved for a patent on the technology behind their affiliate program. Wow, this really has the potential to shake things up a bit. Will software patents like this destroy internet commerce?
posted on Feb 27, 2000 - View this thread

Web-related software patents are starting to look like the new cyber-squatting equivalent. People are patenting all sorts of mundane things like "electronic shopping carts" and "making secure purchases via the internet." My guess is in 3 or 4 years, after many of these silly patents have been awarded, we'll see a restructuring of the US patent system.
posted on Feb 22, 2000 - View this thread

The patent and license exchange An ebay for intellectual property
posted on Aug 12, 1999 - View this thread