Patent Owners Can Prevent You from Owning Anything
eff.org
eff.org
There was only one place I didn't have to do that -- Netflix. It's part of their standard agreement. It even went one step further and said that even if you use their resources, if you do it on your own time you own it, as long as it's not in direct competition with their business. It was a refreshing change for sure.
My current company has this exact policy. It's one of the many reasons I enjoy working there so much. :)
I blacked out all the parts that change based on the company, because I'm not sure how much I was allowed to share.
The list of inventions is basically and thing or idea you had that you might want to work on. It's a good place to list any open source projects as well as any ideas you might be working on for a company.
Turning it around, it would be pretty much untenable if employees could file their own parents on work-related inventions done on company time with company equipment.
Exactly how far "related to your job" extends is up for debate. Because of that, I have an additional clause in my employment contract that specifically states that any contribution I write to FOSS projects is mine to license and distribute.
In no way am I defending the current state of IP or patent law in the US (on the contrary, I would prefer abolishing all patent law over the current system). However, it's definitely not impossible to learn things from patents.
Serious question: How could you know that?
(Someone could have re-discovered those ideas independently and/or your past employers may not spend effort to identify infringement.)
I feel your pain. It's bad enough that the company that holds the patent isn't using it, but you can't use it in future employment. I'll always have this nagging desire to just do it the easy/awesome way, but that's off limits now. The money they give to get a patent isn't worth the roadblock you create for yourself down the road.
Both examples fall under the same umbrella of IP laws run amok and impoverishing society rather than bringing more creation to the public domain.
The only downside is that arbitration is still too much like litigation.
I'm gonna call [citation needed] on this. The recent NYT series on binding arbitration claimed exactly the opposite: that arbitration almost always rules in favor of the company and that arbitration companies which do rule in favor of individuals quickly find themselves getting no more business. They cited peer-reviewed sources and law professors, so I want to see yours.
Would you mind highlighting the article with peer-reviewed sources and law professors explaining that "arbitration almost always rules in favor of the company and that arbitration companies which do rule in favor of individuals quickly find themselves getting no more business"?
Furthermore, even if it was true that "arbitration almost always rules in favor of the company", why would that alone be the sign of a problem? We shouldn't just assume that, for example, half of the victories will go to the company and half to the individual; we shouldn't assume any particular percentage breakdown without more information about who initiates arbitration and why. (The "priors", to make an analogy to Bayesian statistics)
Rejecting the offered source with a "tl;dr" complaint is an invalid distraction from that request.
Not to mention, many topics have not been the subject of peer-reviewed research; if you require peer-reviewed research as a necessary condition on you being persuaded about anything, then you are severely limiting the scope of potential debate.
I've been dreaming about a ballot proposition which says that if a person agreed to a contract that enforced binding arbitration, and was never given an opportunity to amend the contract, then the consumer would be eligible to pick the arbitrator from the set of licensed arbitrators. The company still gets its cost savings from avoiding court, but is not in effect buying a whole firm of arbitrators. The consumer at least can get some attempt at a fair choice in a case of a complaint, which is more choice than they have now.
The Supreme Court decided in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion that the Federal Arbitration Act preempts state laws disfavoring arbitration. Your proposed law would invalidate a large number of existing arbitration agreements and so would likely also be preempted. At this point, it will take an act of Congress to make any significant changes to existing consumer arbitration laws because conflict preemption will invalidate nearly any conceivable state law favoring consumers.
It's an upsetting state of affairs because the federal government does little to protect consumers yet consistently interferes with the ability of state governments to do so (see, e.g., the Office of Comptroller of Currency's frequent interventions to prevent state regulators from investigating predatory lending practices in the years leading up to the financial crisis).
The system is: a small number of monopoly holders, each with strong incentives to expand it, versus the rest of the population, none of whom cares that much about a single case, and a court system that responds to the more motivated party.
The rest is a matter of time.
Can it? Who can prove that there was such a notice, long after the packaging is gone?
Maybe almost all units had such packaging, but I carefully inspected the box before opening the one that I bought, and didn't see any such notice. Can you produce my original packaging to show me the notice?
Or how about: I got it out of box for a reduced price. At the time I completed the sale, there was no packaging. No implicit contract can possibly bind me to a time prior to the sale, when persons unrelated to me in any way removed the packaging.
If you bought the product out of box, then the person who sold it to you had no right to sell it to you! Our agreement with the distributor specifically states that the product must be sold in the original packaging. In the same way that you can't go around selling your neighbour's house, the distributor had no right to sell that product to you. Give it back now please.
Just like if I buy a stolen car and the police come knocking. bye bye car, bye bye cash.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/2738806/A...
The notice does not matter. Patents cover not only manufacturing and sales, but also use of the invention. The patent owner does not need a contract with you, the patent law is enough.
If there exists a valid patent, and you don't have permission from the patent owner, then you technically are not allowed to use your widget regardless of what the packaging does or does not say or where you got it from.
I don't think it changes anything -- my thinking is that suing over what is likely a trivial change made to allow them to screw their customers by giving away the printer and hiding the true cost of ownership in obscenely priced ink by abusing[1] the patent system.
[1] Perhaps this practice is so common-place and blessed by the courts that this is what the "patent system" has become so it's not really "abuse", but if the patent system's design was to encourage expensive R&D by allowing for a brief period of monopoly then it's rarely used for its original purpose.
The EFF takes some artistic license here. The aversions to restraints on the alienability of property apply to real property (i.e. land), which is different than mass-manufactured chattel property for obvious reasons. The doctrine has nothing to do with "consumer expectations" but is instead a way to avoid land-use planning problems that result from use and transfer restrictions in wills.
'Lexmark’s cartridges are “regionalized” such that a cartridge sold in Europe, for instance, will not work in a printer sold in North America or Latin America.'
I found a more detailed explanation from a site that is "pro patents". Ignore the bias, but it's a good explanation of what happened here and I feel it's made it no less distrubing: http://patentlyo.com/patent/2015/04/lexmark-impression-facts...
The TL;(not-terribly-accurate)DR; is that Lexmark patented some elements of their toner cartridge and sold a "regular" and a "single-use" version at a discount with DRM to prevent its re-use. They sued a reseller that circumvented this single-use restriction and won on the "license" that states the single-use cartridge cannot be resold.
This is the kind of case that makes me hate the patent system when I'd otherwise be a proponent of it in spirit[1]. In the case of Lexmark, it appears they're using the patent system in order to continue the lousy practice[2] of charging very little for the printer while gauging the customer on the ink, a practice that I wish the patent system didn't enable. In all likelihood, they've patented some very tiny, novel part of the toner cartridge (perhaps the chip that prevents its reuse?) and are using it to enforce this sort of bait-and-switch.
I also hate the idea of enforcing a "single-use" rule via DRM and then suing to further push the idea that we don't actually own the things we buy. I'll avoid buying products that have these kinds of restrictions but if the practice becomes common-place, I expect I'll begin to have trouble doing that.
It makes me think of the little plastic cups I purchased for a family party I had last year. I was surprised to see them adorned with "U.S. Patents ####." So does this court order indicate that they can simply write a blurb indicating that they may only be used for a "Single Drink" and they can proceed to sue anyone for infringement if they fail to abide? That's reductio ad absurdum, of course, but there's many products/scenarios in-between that which are possible and likely if restricting your customers is your business model.
[1] In theory, I like the idea of giving an inventor who has created something truly unique a brief period of protection against incumbents, who will likely do whatever they can to either prevent the new product from disrupting their existing sales or copy a small inventor out of business. This is provided that the barriers for entry are particularly high. In tech, they're so low that it seems the only way patents are used is for predatory purposes by large companies.
[2] It's a bait and switch of sorts in that people pay less attention to price-per-page than they do the initial investment. It's this reason that I chose to buy a black-and-white laser printer the last time I purchased a printer (2005?). I've gone through two $35-$65 "compatible" toner cartridges since then.
I can't think of anything that would distinguish the little plastic cup case from the case just decided. This ruling is already reductio ad absurdum.