A games and economic theory argument against intellectual property. Watt's on first in academic paper.
posted by klangklangston on Jun 21, 2007 - 42 comments

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 by jonp72 on Apr 7, 2007 - 15 comments

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 by MzB on Jun 19, 2003 - 3 comments

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 by cCranium on Oct 2, 2001 - 8 comments

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 by Steven Den Beste on Feb 3, 2001 - 3 comments

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 by daveadams on Jan 18, 2001 - 25 comments

One word: Creepy. (Note that IBM doesn't actually own this patent -- they just run the patent lookup service.) Props to Victor.
posted by jjg on Oct 5, 2000 - 15 comments

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 by webshaping on Feb 27, 2000 - 3 comments