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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

#61

Post by robertlagrant »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #36
jjeaff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Patent examiners are given a relatively limited time/resource budget to examine applications. For that reason they will often reject early as a strategy [ETA: often, in my experience, with very weak "prior art" that basically matches some keywords], then allow more dedicated inventors to revise. This is mainly a filtering strategy, as best I can see. When your attorney quoted you $10K and suggested the patent would e…

Patent examiners are given a relatively limited time/resource budget to examine applications

But they still take the money. If you take the money you should do a good job.

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

#62

Post by majormajor »

ermir wrote: post #25

Sounds very cruel, another sign that we can't control our technological growth at all. I have a friend, a former FAANG veteran that has dedicated his life to destroying what he calls "techno-Satan", maybe he's on to something. I have also noticed that programmers have a tendency to sometimes distrust the stuff they make. I for one will never install "smart" home devices, I'm happy with my classic light switch that wo…

We can certainly control it - this is a deliberate action by people, not an inevitability. They are 100% in control of the choices they are making here.

If we want to control that as a society, we first have to fight back in the war that's been waged for decades, claiming that any sort of "control" over what people do - even against things that are blindingly obviously bad/cruel/etc - is bad. We've been sold a bill of goods that any control over people doing bad things will simply result in the government doing bad things itself, ignoring that (a) bad things are already happening and (b) none of this moral outrage is actually very effective at stopping the government from doing bad things anyway. We need to be more active, period, in order to fight cruelty in both the public and private space.

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

#63

Post by ImprobableTruth »

jjoonathan wrote: post #50
ImprobableTruth wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

How much of that private spending went to $600k/yr lawyers rather than $60k/yr scientists? How much of the public spending went to $60k/yr scientists rather than $600k/yr lawyers?

Afaik R&D spending really only means actual science - at least that's how R&D spending is defined for tax break purposes, so I'd imagine the stats are using the same definition.

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

#66

Post by parineum »

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.

>A brief taste of freedom may be more cruel than kind,

The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is that it's least cruel to keep all people in solitary confinement rather than remove a single freedom.

That's obviously asinine.

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

#67

Post by matthewdgreen »

jjoonathan wrote: post #48
matthewdgreen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patent examiners are given a relatively limited time/resource budget to examine applications. For that reason they will often reject early as a strategy [ETA: often, in my experience, with very weak "prior art" that basically matches some keywords], then allow more dedicated inventors to revise. This is mainly a filtering strategy, as best I can see. When your attorney quoted you $10K and suggested the patent would e…

Your surprise comes from a perspective of understanding and trusting the process, presumably from experience. Is it really such a surprise that someone with a different experience -- that of extending trust and having it betrayed -- would find it hard to extend trust a second time? And yeah, this system seems to be the worst of all worlds: needlessly punishing for small players and needlessly lucrative for large ones…

I'm not here to defend the patent system. But in general, patent lawyers are your guide to that system. If you don't trust your lawyer's instincts, by all means get a second opinion! But don't just ignore their advice.

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

#68

Post by pclmulqdq »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #30
jjeaff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The more examples I hear, the more I think patents should just be thrown out altogether in many cases. At the very least, software patents in the sense of "if your implementation uses exclusively general purpose computers and software, it cannot be violating a patent".

Alice vs CLS bank threw out most patents saying "do X on a computer." Patents basically have to have a physical effect or give something a property it wouldn't otherwise have, so compression (saving bits) and encryption (giving security properties) are patentable, but most things like web apps and online shopping carts (an infamous patent troll sued many people over this pre-Alice) are not.

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

#69

Post by pclmulqdq »

auggierose wrote: post #40
matthewdgreen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patent examiners are given a relatively limited time/resource budget to examine applications. For that reason they will often reject early as a strategy [ETA: often, in my experience, with very weak "prior art" that basically matches some keywords], then allow more dedicated inventors to revise. This is mainly a filtering strategy, as best I can see. When your attorney quoted you $10K and suggested the patent would e…

It's ridiculous that you have to spend $10K to patent your idea. Let's just get rid of all those patent office people and lawyers, and save everyone a lot of time and money.

The $10k is a feature, not a bug. Society shouldn't allow patents to be filed without commercial intent (because otherwise you are depriving the world of an idea for 20 years without meaningfully using it), and a $10k pricetag is a good signal of commercial intent. In the EU, patents have escalating fees to make sure that patent rights are only guaranteed as long as a commercial enterprise continues to be successful.

And no, the intent to file and then sell the patent is not a good "commercial intent."

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

#70

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #68
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more examples I hear, the more I think patents should just be thrown out altogether in many cases. At the very least, software patents in the sense of "if your implementation uses exclusively general purpose computers and software, it cannot be violating a patent".

Alice vs CLS bank threw out most patents saying "do X on a computer." Patents basically have to have a physical effect or give something a property it wouldn't otherwise have, so compression (saving bits) and encryption (giving security properties) are patentable, but most things like web apps and online shopping carts (an infamous patent troll sued many people over this pre-Alice) are not.

> so compression (saving bits) and encryption (giving security properties) are patentable

Which is a huge problem, because now you again need an army of lawyers just to determine whether something is patentable, and can redesign/argue around stuff to make it look patentable even where it should not be.

It would be much nicer if you could say "Here is a mass market consumer grade laptop I purchased at Walmart this morning. Here is the software running on it. Your patent claim is invalid. Your honor, I'd like my legal fees reimbursed and the plaintiff's attorney sentenced to sixty lashes for wasting everybody's time".

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