by Doug Coulter » Fri Jul 01, 2011 6:06 pm
I'm afraid it's going the other way with things like ACTA and the DEA (yours, not ours). And I and all of us together can't outbribe Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Apple, and all of Hollywood, which uses both monetary bribes and "publicity" to get the best laws money can buy - for them. The only new thing in this story is just how blatant they now are about it all.
There are even several books out now about which banks (for example) paid the most lobbyists and campaign contributions. Guess which ones were bailed out, and which were allowed to fail?
Neither the figures or the history are in any dispute. No one cares who can do anything about it. At election time, we only get to choose between candidates that have already been vetted by the parties and who are bought already -- it matters not at all who we vote for. Anybody out there see any real difference between our last two presidents? Any actual policy changes? Anything but utterly broken campaign promises? Do we still have Gitmo? Yes. Do we still shoot people all over the world? More than before. Did we just pass a so called health care law that empowers the very people who made it so expensive and ineffective, in effect mandating we all pay into the corrupt private insurance system and can no longer opt out? Yep. Are warrantless wiretaps, and even the secret parts of the misnamed Patiiot act all still in place? Yes, more than before. Did the government block suits and FOIA requests from the phone companies to cover up their own illegal acts -- yes. Is writing my "representative" going to do any good? Surely you live in the land of unicorns. Can't even shoot them, the sympathy backlash would only make things even worse.
In the financial field -- did you know they (congressmen) are allowed to do trading on insider knowledge? -- They know which companies are about to get lush government contracts and aid. It's illegal if I do that - and they only have to report yearly, so I can't find out what they are buying either. That they are exempt from all these nasty laws they force us to obey? Old news, but maybe not widely known outside USA. Have any of their banker-owners gone to jail for defrauding the taxpayers here and worldwide? Not one -- only small time crooks have been busted, not the big ones. Can I vote out Barney Frank, whose idea this all was? Nope, not in my district. Will his own people vote him out? Never, he's got seniority and brings home the bacon for them at my expense. It's like being Germany in the Euro and having to bail Greece -- anyone ask the Germans if they wanted to do that or care what they thought? No so much. Is it a coincidence that our "Fed" banking is all populated with Goldman Sachs alumni? Or that 100% of them after leaving government service get high paying jobs back there?
Like I said, the only thing new under this sun is that they no longer care if everyone knows it.
Isn't the timing of the Strauss-Kahn thing interesting -- busted for rape just before he was about to tell the truth about the Greek bailout -- which forces them into sure default, but only after the banks unload their debt and CDSs (which is really a French-German bank bailout) and now set free since he's no longer a threat?
Funny what dealing with the uber rich as I do for a living lets you in on a lot of how the world is actually run. The laws and theories are nice, but....only there to keep the sheep on the couch drinking beer and watching TV instead of out in the streets.
Trademarks are permanent, and copyrights might as well now be. Ever since Walt Disney raped the public domain to make cartoons, not one copyright has ever expired.
Patents are now merely a tool in the arsenal of the bigs to prevent any upstart competition -- they can cross license, no money changes hands. You can't do anything, even write a few lines of code, without breaking one, and it's so bad that the legal advice now is to not look as that makes your infringement "willful" - and it's a big reason most software isn't open source, as it all contains patent violations. You don't have enough stuff to cross license. It's not that the bigs don't hate one another, they do, but they fear any innovation they don't own that might be disruptive, so they've long ago locked that down.
Or usually they cross license. The gold rush in the mobile space currently has 100% of the mobile manufacturers in lawsuits with 100% of the others -- actually it's more than that, as many are multiple suits and if you look at what they are over -- not one of those things should have been patentable by law. Doesn't matter, there's a patent and any decent lawyer can get delays, injunctions and so on and destroy you over the years it takes to get settled. NYT and WSJ newspapers have shown graphics of "Who is suiing who" and the lines obliterate the space.
All the M&A in the business world is a tacit admission that there's no more innovation coming from those guys - they are just buying more customers, laying off people and fighting over the size of the slice vs increasing the size of the pie.
Your quote of US law (if it's still current and hasn't been changed, which is quite likely) is missing the point. Note that it's "filing" time that counts. That's just what I was saying -- you can file a patent, and keep it secret for however long (the record is, I think 19 years), wait for someone to start using it - because it was obvious enough they invented it themself, then call back the filing delay, get your patent and sue them and win. It's common here, and probably there too. Which is why we call it a submarine patent.
Let's suppose this -- I figure out that now that there are super strong permanent magnets, someday someone is going to start making things like cyclotrons out of them -- or some other obvious use, say, tiny gyroscopes. I file for a patent on that, never having done it, of course, because I can't afford to yet, or the other tech isn't yet there, but it's obvious that it will be in the next 10 years or so. I keep the patent in limbo - filed but not issued, and thus a secret, for years (they let you do that) while I keep my eye on the market, and add and adapt claims as others start doing this, heck, it's obvious. When the market is big enough in adoption of "my patent" -- I stop doing that, let them issue it, and bingo -- I can sue all the cyclotron manufacturers all day long, and win. This is what the bar code guy did -- same in all but details of the invention. Any fool can patent something tech doesn't yet exist for, extrapolate that during some time it will come into existence, and it will if it requires no new science -- patent early, keep it a secret, and use that "filing date" junk to claim priority later, even for claims added at the very last second. And it's done all the time, and we have a particular federal district court in Texas that helps this along, every single time -- its where they all file these suits.
In other words, its perfectly legal to file an utterly bogus patent now, change the claims over ten years, then get it issued, and still have priority on those late claims from the filing date, not when I added them last week.
I obviously haven't read the guys claims, but I'd bet real good money that patent flies right through. The only people who get rejected are those with a really bad preceding reputation issue, or a lawyer who doesn't know how to write obfuscated claims.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.