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Prison Company Patents VR to Give Inmates Brief Taste of Freedom

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Re: Prison Company Patents VR to Give Inmates Brief Taste of Freedom

#11

Post by danShumway »

Holy crud, literally everything about this is terrible, from the motivation/phrasing, to the "market" it's a part of, to the followup research about using VR to torture people, to the technical merits of the patent itself.

Rare to find an article that so efficiently touches on so many simultaneous points of awfulness.

I realize it's only one aspect of the article, but it's tough to talk about patent reform when stuff like this that is so obviously not a real invention is still so regularly slipping through the system. There's a real conversation to be had about how much of a patent monopoly we should be granting businesses for legitimate patents, but there's an even bigger conversation to be had about how we ended up with a patent office that's willing to rubber-stamp everything they're handed. Under the current system we have today this patent shouldn't have been granted, it's not a novel invention. That's not even a reform problem it's an... I don't know, caring problem? A lack of review problem?

Re: Prison Company Patents VR to Give Inmates Brief Taste of Freedom

#12

Post by mwint »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #4
mchusma wrote: post #2

What a crappy patent. We really need patent reform. This is basically a patent troll (or they plan to be a gatekeeper and make money from the companies that make VR). This company has about a 0% chance in the next 20 years of producing high quality VR. There is already prior art here. So many ways to make patents better, including: - making it more expensive, with annual fees - increase the cost over time - just gene…

Allowing nullification by demonstrated lack of effort to utilize the patent, relative to the means of the patent holder is my personal belief.

Under your system, would attempting to sell/license the patent to someone else count as effort-to-utilize?

Re: Prison Company Patents VR to Give Inmates Brief Taste of Freedom

#13

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

There is a movie called "Otherlife" available on Prime that explores a bit of this question of using alternate realities in a prison context. It is slightly DIFFERENT in that the premise there is that VR can serve as the prison itself, rather than a supposed escape from it. An enjoyable watch if the premise sounds appealing to you.

Re: Prison Company Patents VR to Give Inmates Brief Taste of Freedom

#14

Post by ImprobableTruth »

mchusma wrote: post #2

What a crappy patent. We really need patent reform. This is basically a patent troll (or they plan to be a gatekeeper and make money from the companies that make VR). This company has about a 0% chance in the next 20 years of producing high quality VR. There is already prior art here. So many ways to make patents better, including: - making it more expensive, with annual fees - increase the cost over time - just gene…

>We can also incentivize in other ways, like grants and contests

You would need to quadruple healthcare r&d spending to make up for private spending (in 2018 it was 130 billion private to 43 billion public r&d spending). Not impossible, but a tough sell.

Re: Prison Company Patents VR to Give Inmates Brief Taste of Freedom

#15

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

literallyaduck wrote: post #10
hirundo wrote: post #9

A brief taste of freedom may be more cruel than kind, though I doubt it's cruel enough to trigger the eighth amendment. On the other hand, it does meet the standard of "unusual". The Pythons pioneered the "comfy chair" torture technique, which was supposed to be a joke. But if got the brief use of a comfy chair then had to go back to a hard bench it would be worse than before.

Just like work from home vs returning to the office.

Yup. I've experienced the Rick & Morty perfectly level space, please don't send me back into the topsy turvy office.

Though this all seems a little insensitive to be complaining about our white color concerns when this seems to be an innovative new method to torture inmates for some reason.

Re: Prison Company Patents VR to Give Inmates Brief Taste of Freedom

#16

Post by [deleted] »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #13

There is a movie called "Otherlife" available on Prime that explores a bit of this question of using alternate realities in a prison context. It is slightly DIFFERENT in that the premise there is that VR can serve as the prison itself, rather than a supposed escape from it. An enjoyable watch if the premise sounds appealing to you.

[deleted]

Re: Prison Company Patents VR to Give Inmates Brief Taste of Freedom

#17

Post by spywaregorilla »

mwint wrote: post #12
spywaregorilla wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing nullification by demonstrated lack of effort to utilize the patent, relative to the means of the patent holder is my personal belief.

Under your system, would attempting to sell/license the patent to someone else count as effort-to-utilize?

Sure. Provided the new owners / licenses meet the bar for actually utilizing the patent.

Re: Prison Company Patents VR to Give Inmates Brief Taste of Freedom

#19

Post by teddyh »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #15
literallyaduck wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like work from home vs returning to the office.

Yup. I've experienced the Rick & Morty perfectly level space, please don't send me back into the topsy turvy office. Though this all seems a little insensitive to be complaining about our white color concerns when this seems to be an innovative new method to torture inmates for some reason.

“I knew it was a mistake to let them taste happiness.”

https://dilbert.com/strip/2021-05-08

Re: Prison Company Patents VR to Give Inmates Brief Taste of Freedom

#20

Post by jjeaff »

danShumway wrote: post #11

Holy crud, literally everything about this is terrible, from the motivation/phrasing, to the "market" it's a part of, to the followup research about using VR to torture people, to the technical merits of the patent itself. Rare to find an article that so efficiently touches on so many simultaneous points of awfulness. I realize it's only one aspect of the article, but it's tough to talk about patent reform when stuff…

I think it's worse than the patent office rubber stamping everything. They actually don't rubber stamp things that your average, small inventor might try to patent. They seem to always initially reject applications, requiring multiple submissions with small modifications over and over until they relent and grant.

This serves to filter out everyone except those with deep pockets and highly paid patent attorneys.

When I filed for a patent a few years ago, we got back prior art from the patent office that was very far fetched. We paid $3500 to the attorney for the initial application and then each time it would come back, we would pay a few hundred more.

Our patent attorney estimated that we would end up paying around $10k, but he was fairly certain that we would get through. He said most of his applications followed this same pattern.

We decided to cut our losses at around $5k and move on. A few years later, some large company patented very similar technology. We submitted prior art but they just had to pay for a few more iterations to get around it.

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