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To: BelowTheCrowd who wrote (183450)	2/8/2006 7:28:16 AM
From: aleph0	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Yes, the blogspot was written well. IIRC didn't Visicalc go out of business due to a patent on "2 lines of text, one under the other, displayed on a screen" ? Absolutely ridiculous IMO ! Actually, just as ridiculous IMO is the PTSC patent on "CPU clock-multipliers" - whereby AMD, Intel and now even HPQ if I'm not mistaken have paid up ! The US system is IMO designed to make the lawyers rich and strangle innovation. This(US system) must be changed - and fast IMO !

To: BelowTheCrowd who wrote (183450)	2/23/2006 11:10:37 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Web design firm patents most Internet rich media Licence required for Flash, Flex, Java, Ajax, and XAML A CALIFORNIAN small web-design outfit has managed to get the patent for most of the media technology which power the world wide wibbly web. Balthaser Online says getting the patent means that it can license nearly any rich-media Internet application across a broad range of devices and networks. It means that anyone who wants to use Flash, Flex, Java, Ajax, and XAML could face a licensing fee from Balthaser when their site goes up. The patent, No. 7,000,180, has the catchy title Methods, Systems, And Processes For The Design And Creation Of Rich-Media Applications Via The Internet. It contains 83 claims that It covers a "host computer, containing processes for creating rich-media applications, is accessed from a remote user computer system via an Internet connection... theinquirer.net Fixing the patent system part 3 The US Patent system is a mess, it is time to fix it. Free software advocates frequently argue that software patents should be excluded completely. I don't think that is a sustainable line of argument, if software is to be excluded then why not other types of invention? Its a slippery slope that quickly leads to the argument that the patent system should be abandoned altogether. This is not necessarily an invalid argument, the US patent system today is certainly doing more harm than good but an argument for abolition is certain to fail. It is hard to think of an example of a software innovation that is the result of the patent system. Even the RSA encryption algorithm, a rare example of a justifiable software patent and one of the most profitable software patents ever was patented as an afterthought. This is not the case with biotechnology patents where billions of research dollars are spent each year to discover patentable drugs. Take away the patents and you take away the research. Patents are a valid incentive for innovative research. The European patent system works without causing the major problems that the US patent office has... ...Manifesto Point: End backdating of patent claims... ...Manifesto Point: Mere combination of obvious idea should not be patentable... ...Manifesto Point: The scope of a patent should only cover what was actually invented... dotfuturemanifesto.blogspot.com

To: BelowTheCrowd who wrote (183450)	3/30/2006 6:35:56 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 186894

OT Its not just minor hardware or software features. Patent limitations of genetic testing? The BRCA genes are the most prominent genes involved in hereditary breast cancer. Pioneering work by an academic research group located the chromosomal regions where they reside, but a biotech company, Myriad Genetics, ultimately identified the genes. This allowed them to develop a test for mutations in these genes, which would let individuals in families with a history of breast cancer determine whether they were at risk, and make medical decisions accordingly. Were everything that simple, this would be a great example of how the revolution in modern genetics is supposed to work. Unfortunately, both of these genes were enormous, and mutations anywhere along their length could potentially place a person at risk. Genetic screening to identify all possible mutations would require weeks of work by a skilled technician, and thus be prohibitively expensive. As a result, Myriad quite reasonably developed a test that recognized the most common inherited mutations, providing many individuals with postive identification, but failing to truly rule out anyone as a potential carrier of mutations. This is clearly a limitation to the test, but how much of a limitation was uncertain. New results suggest that the uncertainty could be as high as 12 percent. In other words, up to 12 percent of the patients that weren't identified as being at risk by this test are still carrying mutations in the gene. Given this relatively high rate of error, the question then becomes how to improve the test. And that's where things become tricky. Myriad took out a patent on the test they developed and, in the US, have sole rights to market a BRCA test. arstechnica.com Patents as thought control arstechnica.com