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The Silencing of Maya

niederfamily.blogspot.be

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Re: The Silencing of Maya

#21

Post by ChuckMcM »

earl wrote: post #15
ChuckMcM wrote: post #7

Ok, I've read it twice. I'm not sure I understand the argument. It reads like the argument is "This technology helps handicapped people so you shouldn't allow it to be patented." Is that a reasonable argument? PRC seems to have a valid patent, they sell a device the people in the article could use, Speak For Yourself infringed without a license and they are the good guys why? The patent argument would go, "PRC figure…

clicking glyphs on a screen and having a device speak the words the glyphs represent is patent worthy? It's a perfect parallel to ASL. And there's enough social utility that we should help companies gouge parents $8k a pop [1] instead of $400 ipad + $unknown for software? [1] http://store.prentrom.com/

"clicking glyphs on a screen and having a device speak the words the glyphs represent is patent worthy?"

I wouldn't think so, this patent is #5,920,303 which relates to a way of making is easy and efficient to access a large vocabulary from a screen with limited space. Reading through the patent just now I wouldn't say it is particularly obvious that this would be the best way to go about things. Its got about 5 years left in its lifetime.

Is it possible the folks at SfY saw one of PRC's devices and say "Hey would could code that up in an App!" and didn't check to see if it was patented? I don't know, just reading and wondering.

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#22

Post by asmithmd1 »

krschultz wrote: post #17

" To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts , by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" - US Constitution Section 8 At the time of the writing of the Constitution something was needed to help spur innovation. It was written in the time of inventions like the cotton gin (easily copied 100x over by anyone who bought 1). But make no…

There are other alternatives.

Have you ever wondered why bands are allowed to "cover" other bands music without any kind of prior permission? It is because the US Congress wrote something called a compulsory license into the copyright law. Music was thought too important to our culture to allow one person to have control over a new song.

I say it is time we brought the idea of a compulsory license to patents.

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#23

Post by rpedroso »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #7

Ok, I've read it twice. I'm not sure I understand the argument. It reads like the argument is "This technology helps handicapped people so you shouldn't allow it to be patented." Is that a reasonable argument? PRC seems to have a valid patent, they sell a device the people in the article could use, Speak For Yourself infringed without a license and they are the good guys why? The patent argument would go, "PRC figure…

I'm not sure that the argument is the important part of this article; a lot of it was about lamentation. The author admits to having little knowledge of patent laws, and is offering their story for perspective.

As far as I can tell there were two points being made:

1. Apple might have been premature in pulling the app from the App Store. Not being under any immediate legal obligation to block the app, nor a ruling on whether there was infringement.

2. It might be unethical to go as far as having the app removed from the store this early on in their litigation. That move might take speech away from people who depend on Speak for Yourself.

I'm not saying those are good arguments, but they are what they are.

Also worth noting is the cost of SfY vs PRC products:

- The Speak for Yourself app cost $190, on top of the price of an iPad. The least expensive PRC product is $2,595. It seems geared towards the very young, or otherwise those with a fairly limited speech/thought faculties, hence they call it "SpringBoard Lite". The rest of PRC's products range from $7500 - $15,000.

I mention the prices because I wondered why the author couldn't just go buy one of PRC's products. They may be prohibitively expensive.

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#24

Post by monochromatic »

earl wrote: post #15
ChuckMcM wrote: post #7

Ok, I've read it twice. I'm not sure I understand the argument. It reads like the argument is "This technology helps handicapped people so you shouldn't allow it to be patented." Is that a reasonable argument? PRC seems to have a valid patent, they sell a device the people in the article could use, Speak For Yourself infringed without a license and they are the good guys why? The patent argument would go, "PRC figure…

clicking glyphs on a screen and having a device speak the words the glyphs represent is patent worthy? It's a perfect parallel to ASL. And there's enough social utility that we should help companies gouge parents $8k a pop [1] instead of $400 ipad + $unknown for software? [1] http://store.prentrom.com/

In fairness, nobody has mentioned what patent is allegedly infringed here. I'd be curious to see it.

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#26

Post by monochromatic »

domwood wrote: post #13

rant/ Nothing instills rage in me more than companies, knowing how essential what they sell is, slagging each other for petty, pointless money. I hate to be dramatic, but these are disabled adults and children for christ's sake, people who need things like SfY. I just do not understand how someone at the litigating company thought "hey, let's go sue a company over some very complex and possibly unfounded patent alleg…

> petty, pointless money

Oh, you mean that same money that is literally the only reason that they provide these "essential" products?

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#27

Post by meaydinli »

Does SfY have iOS specific functions? If not, one option would be to port it to Android, and then use it on a rooted android device. Since android doesn't depend on a single marketplace, it would be harder to remove it completely.

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#28

Post by pasbesoin »

Karunamon wrote: post #16
pasbesoin wrote: post #9

Where's Jobs when you need him?

What the heck does Jobs have to do with this? The man was a capitalist and hardly a philanthropist.

Cynically: He knew the value of PR. Less cynically: He knew the value of children, and that such a situation would be deserving of secondary review and a conservative (in the non-political sense) course of action -- or inaction, until such time as a legal determination was made.

This might be one of those situations to benefit from that occasional, "direct line" to Jobs.

Regardless of the final determination of intellectual property rights, you don't cut kids off from such transformative assistance. You. Just. Don't.

If you've worked with such kids, you know how precious it is.

P.S. And yes, my grandparent post was somewhat rhetorical. In the small hope that such attitude, expressed more broadly, might provoke Apple into a further review and perhaps a "wait and see" position.

Re: The Silencing of Maya

#29

Post by MBlume »

I've said this before and I'll say it again. One of the villains in this piece is Apple. Many of the people reading this comment are talented engineers. What Apple needs to survive, more than anything, are talented engineers. So don't work at Apple. Don't work for companies that compromise ethics in this way.

There's a reason Microsoft has been failing to compete for a while. It's because its practices got so evil that if you got offered a job there, your friends would make ha-ha-only-serious jokes about you going to work for Darth Vader. And so the best engineers, the one with options, went looking elsewhere. We need a culture like this now around Oracle, around Apple.

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