81–90 of 217 posts
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Or challenged before the patent is issued. The USPTO encourages this; fees for notifying them of prior art are much lower before issuance.
Wait a fee is imposed? I get why I think but if your posting of prior art proves to be true then you should have your fee refunded.
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Just publishing prior art, in a way that proves when you did it, is sufficient. It can still be a problem if you're not aware your idea is being patented, so the patent office doesn't find your prior art, but that's not an issue here. There are also services where you can register your prior art, which say the USPTO uses them when evaluating claims; I don't know how useful they are in practice.
We (USA) and are a first to patent country now. https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/16/first-to-file-a-primer/
Then things start to make a bit more sense with another engineer interested in coders actually digging in and verifying / debugging his work.
And then of course it takes a dark turn at the end with Google applying to patent his ideas which he so generously offered to them.
This is a reason for using [L]GPL: explicit patent protection. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.en.html https://fsfe.org/campaigns/gplv3/patents-and-gplv3.en.html#E...
In general, there is no way to prevent patent claims on your work other than to defensively patent every conceivable application of it. That is why all major corporations have large portfolios of such patents.
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I explicitly put some code samples under CC0 because I want people to feel complete freedom to copy and paste the code without needing to maintain attribution or worry about licensing compatibility. For example: https://jsfiddle.net/rectang/fwto2ejh/ The CC0 dedication is at the bottom; you have to scroll to it. I chose to slightly modify the CC0 dedication for this to comport with the fact that you won't receive a c…
Can you elaborate on why this is advantageous to the situation in the article?
I'm confident that there are no patentable ideas in my code and my purpose is just to minimize the burden on downstream users of copyright licensing.
If there were patented ideas in my code that I wished to license to downstream users, CC0 would actually be a poor choice, because it explicitly excludes a patent grant. That's why CC0 is not endorsed by OSI, and there's been a lot of hand-wringing over that clause.
Note that if you do copy/paste public domain code into a non-trivial project, you still should record its origins in version control at least -- even if the license doesn't require attribution.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch_GmbH
I guess you want to highlight that the company is owned mostly by a charitable foundation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch_GmbH#Corporate_af... ), but I think it's important to realize that the company itself still operates as a profit maximizer for its shareholders. You only need to scroll down to the section about their involvement in the Volkswagen emissions scandal for proof of that.
The point is that a company doesn’t have to always “maximize profits”. Tim Cook famously told a shareholder to “get out of the stock” if that was how he assessed his portfolio. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
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Licensing is not that simple. From the Creative Commons CC0 page. "Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute their works for public use before applicable copyright or database protection terms expire. Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily and reliably. Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to what rights are automatically grante…
I don't see people dropping sqlite en masse.
If you're making a reference to SQLite being in the Public Domain, there's a page on SQLite's website for organizations to purchase a Warranty of Title, which shows organizations can be skittish about anything.[1]
Are you referring to a program that is being dropped because it's not in the Public Domain? If so, I am for an example. As a potential counterexample, I am not aware of a drop of usage on, say, cURL, which is widely distributed by countless organizations and which uses the MIT license.
What is the relative advantage of putting something into the public domain versus releasing under an Apache 2 or MIT license? The latter doesn’t restrict anyone’s use AND establishes a public record to refute what Google is trying to do. Additionally, communications by email could be via GitHub issues and open to all to see.
enedil is correct. To expand on that: MIT and Apache2 grant a licence to copyrightable expression. But the literal code is not what is patented, the idea is. Granting a license to the code doesn't automatically prevent someone else from patenting the idea. MIT doesn't say anything about patents. Apache2 additionally grants a licence to any patents which the author has which cover the work, and also tries to prevent s…
What is the relative advantage of putting something into the public domain versus releasing under an Apache 2 or MIT license? The latter doesn’t restrict anyone’s use AND establishes a public record to refute what Google is trying to do. Additionally, communications by email could be via GitHub issues and open to all to see.
enedil is correct. To expand on that: MIT and Apache2 grant a licence to copyrightable expression. But the literal code is not what is patented, the idea is. Granting a license to the code doesn't automatically prevent someone else from patenting the idea. MIT doesn't say anything about patents. Apache2 additionally grants a licence to any patents which the author has which cover the work, and also tries to prevent s…
I was at Xerox when they were fighting a patent on their ideas. At that point in time all you had to do was prove prior art on the idea. Xerox used their notes during software development plus the code to prove prior art.
Similarly I was at Apple when they fought a basic patent on color matching. Apple succeeded in fighting the patent then proactively started patenting everything.
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> the author should have patented the idea, then freely licensed it This is the brutal truth of how crappy our current patent mechanisms are. The definition of what constitutes a patentable extension to practice of ideas that are well known or explicitly in the public domain is very weak. So, until something is patented and actively protected by bulldog lawyers, there is a risk of someone else trying to umbrella it i…
The only solution to put an end to the current patent system is to overload it. The equivalent of a DDos attack. Companies should file as many frivolous patent as they possibly can. Eventually, we'll have all the IP lawyers at 100% CPU and the world will be a much better place.