From - Thu Apr 17 14:32:23 2003 X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: carl@andisplanet.com Received: from wiley (node-402421a9.mdw.onnet.us.uu.net [64.36.33.169]) by andisplanet.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0BB9E91102 for ; Thu, 27 Mar 2003 17:25:52 -0800 (PST) Received: from geraldgleason.com (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by wiley (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id h2S00Wv28577 for ; Thu, 27 Mar 2003 18:00:33 -0600 Message-ID: <3E83909F.9010903@geraldgleason.com> Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 18:00:31 -0600 From: Gerry Gleason User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020408 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: discuss@ggpl.org Subject: Re: Patents References: <3E814E99.20503@ggpl.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Carl Vilbrandt wrote: > Dear Francois, > Thanks for your help in making the issues about patents very clear and > your very timely suggestion ... :-) about timestamping the design. Thanks particularly for the link to the firstmonday article. It took a while, but I got through it. It really is quite frightening they way the patent system (US and Europe) is described to be largely unresponsive to any policy input. I find it particularly striking that Lessig's speech doesn't say anything about this situation, as he pushes his audience to get more involved in policy matters with respect to patents and copyrights. If this paper is reflecting the true nature of the situation, it doesn't look like either the USPTO or the EPO would be at all responsive to policy input, even from legislatures. > > I am not in favor giving money to the USPO and most certainly a patent > ( rather is it immaterial patent a complete outrage or a material base > patent ) that is owned or controlled by one person or one large > company should be avoided. Agreed. The picture painted is of an entire system that only cares about propagating itself, with no regard for any of the important purposes they exist to serve. It isn't even clear that anyone within the system realizes what has happened because everyone is focussed on their narrow specialty. > > FP is quiet right ..... Organis even if it is published through the > Osaka design competition as prior art could be patented by moneyed > just to be shut down or extract money from Organis groups. Putting a > patent on the Organis design would be a stratagem move that might > invite implementation funding ....... If we patent Organis it must be > done carefully.... If you patent the immaterial world it gives it a > monetary value so the immaterial world can be taken over by entities > with large financial resources. I'm a little confused here, you seem to be contradicting everything else to this point in the discussion, and why wouldn't publishing it in the design competition establish it as prior art with a timeframe? The very fact that we are discussing it this way distributes the proof both to a number of people and on a number of systems, but your suggestion of printing, signing and dating would be good too. > > In the time being I would ask that all of us should date and print out > the most important parts of Organis design and sign them as the design > emerges in our e-mails. As a disscuss@ggpl group we all have designed > Organis together it does not belong to any one of us, but all of us > and this gives some protection. All of your names should appear on > the submission / publication to Osaka design completion (a large very > public event) makes it prior art and gives more protection from > patents. The purpose's of the Osaka design completion are in concert > with the Organis. > >> The solution is to timestamp and/or publish its >> specifications ASAP, to make prior art. This will >> be as valid as prior art by patents, because you >> do not want to exclude people from using Organis, >> but just make sure that nobody prevents other people >> including you from developing it. > The only ray of hope that I gleaned from the paper is that there are a lot of industries and companies that are very negatively effected by the current situation, and not just OS developers and companies. What it says is that the complexity of the issues and the expensive and specialized experts means that only the largest companies are likely to have full time patent experts and most of the policy input originates from various trade associations. So, it seems that education and research on the economic issues and other pressures must be brought to bear directly on the patent systems from the companies and trade associations. Perhaps even IBM can be convinced to forgo the exploitation of their considerable portfolio of software patents for the benefit of their relationship with the Linux project and the goodwill of the community. I'm coming to the conclusion that the whole patent issue is way bigger and more daunting than I first thought. Although it will be challenging to convince a critical mass of the importance of the issues, and to push a plan of action that will actually change things, I don't see any other practical way to address the basic problems. Gerry