With EFF’s help, language teacher responds to threat over ‘invalid’ patent
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What did Congress say?
Representative democracy FTW.
Edit: You'll also want to use a VPN to access the app from the country its from.
If you do respond (if not, no worries), I'm also curious how invasive -- or, hopefully, not -- those apps are. Rampant data monitors scrapers, or more "public service" type functions. I recall when some of these countries actively worked to promote their languages and cultures; a foreign student could get some nice resources just by asking or knowing where to go (e.g. a local Goethe Institute).
Swedish - SVT for adults, Barnkanalen for kids
German - ZDF for kids and adults, Kika.de and Kikaninchen app for kids
I haven't tried it yet but there are some French networks (Zazou, I think) and NRK for Norway. Wikipedia is a good starting point to find television networks by country, then check which ones have apps or let you watch the programs online (just try accessing the site from the country with a VPN for the full experience)
Do you fear the cultural repercussions of this stance just to increase fluency? For its faults, media and culture are closely aligned and I would be worried that this is then artificially removing local culture by requiring only media from other languages.
The whole have-to-use-our-app thing is ridiculous, especially since there are so many web APIs that imitate apps.
Groups like the EFF try to make patent law into a civil rights issue. They'll regularly frame the issues as being about big corporations misusing patents against "the little guy", often a sympathetic figure like the activist and language learning site admin here. They try to get ordinary people riled up about what patent law should be, often by misconstruing facts and simplifying current patent law, which can be quite nuanced.
Actual patent disputes are always between businesses and always concern financial interests. There is always one party who doesn't want to pay licensing fees or wants to do something that the other party doesn't want to license. The businesses could negotiate a deal where they would all make money, or the allegedly-infringing party could "invent around" the patent, but for whatever reason they can't agree on how much money each of them should make and they decide that a lawsuit is a better course of action.
In any case, some businesses will give money to the EFF and the EFF is happy to present views that are compatible with those businesses' interests. Everyone else is just taken for a ride.
Political parties are made up of members. Some members will benefit from some policies. Many because their business interests will benefit from said policies. To claim they are unrelated seems fishy, at best.
Now, you are probably right that nobody cares at high level whether it is a Democrat or a Republican policy that is benefiting them. I would wager the odds are good that businesses frequently get benefits from one more than the other, though.
What I mean is act more like a non partisan judge who puersues justice rather than an entity that evolves into a political entity which becomes activist in pursuit of its own goals.
Take for example the Makerbot patent on the Thing-O-Matic, a conveyor belt add on for 3D printers. Makerbot patented the concept, then discontinued the product. Hobbyists who designed upgrades to share freely openly expressed frustration for years about this. Many people wanted the device but community members regularly expressed in online communities that they feared legal action if they designed an open source replacement for the defunct patented product.
Finally recently some hobbyists have found a way to work around the patent by designing a printer where the print head is not parallel to the build plate (a key claim of the patent in question). However printing this way has some major limitations, and the original process would be simpler. The 3D printing community was held back for 5-10 years in sequential printing technology because of this patent.
When a free group of people are prohibited from sharing ideas with each other due to fear from state intervention, it absolutely becomes a civil rights issue. Is it fair for the government to prevent individuals from freely exchanging information because a third party has laid claim to that idea? Is it even a legitimate claim that one entity can own an idea that they formed through the integration of preexisting ideas? From a practical perspective does the legal artifice of intellectual property even serve the oft-cited purpose of improving the general welfare? Should we continue to support this notion?
These are questions we all should ask ourselves and debate amongst each other. We invented intellectual property and created laws that enforce it. We must continue to discuss if such an extreme limit on human behavior is rational or fair in the modern world. Billions of people are prohibited from accessing information that could help them thrive. We can now copy information at almost no cost, but our legal system prevents us from doing so for the bulk of the world’s knowledge. Is this just? Is it sensible?
As far as I know you can make it as the patent expression (not patent itself) had been invalidated by pulling the patented product from the market and providing no alternative. It's a bit different from trolls as there was a product and it was pulled.
Regarding your 3D printer example, there will always be ways to "invent around" to accomplish the same result. For example, if the patent claims a 3D printer with a conveyer belt, that would not prevent someone from building a 3D printer with a turntable to accomplish the same goal. (There is a caveat here if a turntable is considered an equivalent to a conveyor belt.)
Historically, there has been an experimental use defense for those seeking to improve upon a patented invention. Theoretically it still exists, but it wouldn't apply in a commercial context, which would include a hobbyist distributing small numbers of infringing devices. This exception should be more clearly defined, but that probably won't happen because patentees don't bring frivolous lawsuits against non-commercial experimenters. Again, patent law is all about business interests.
Another way to avoid infringement is to make either (1) a component which has substantial non-infringing uses, such that it does not fall under 35 USC 271(c), or (2) an a improved replacement component for the patented device. Using your 3D printer example, a generic conveyor belt might be a staple article with substantial non-infringing uses. You would be able to make and sell those without infringing on the Makerbot patent. You could also sell a replacement component that only works with the Makerbot printer, because that would fall under the Patent Exhaustion Doctrine, which says that once a patented device is sold, the buyer can replace worn-out parts without infringing.
Patent law does not prevent anyone from sharing information about the invention or about improvements to it. A problem only arises when people cross the line to actively inducing the infringement of others, knowing of the patent and knowing that their actions will induce others to infringe.
Again, these issues are primarily about business interests and competition, not civil rights. Unfortunately, the EFF does a lot of misconstruing the facts to get people agitated, and very little to actually educate the community. Communities of hobbyists who fear lawsuits would be better served by an organization that taught them how to accomplish their goals without getting sued, rather than one which just wants to agitate to overthrow the entire patent system.
Perhaps the burden is small in some cases, but it is nonetheless a burden placed on individuals. You claim the law doesn’t prevent people from sharing improvements may be true (you sound knowledgeable) but this was lost on the community members who wanted to design upgrades. I specifically remember mailing list discussions where individuals believed that sharing infringing designs was a violation of the law. Which is something it seems you verified (inducing infringement). I reiterate that this is a legal restriction placed on free individuals operating outside of commercial interests, and so I continue to believe this is a civil rights issue. I will also say that upgrades to the original device are of limited utility because the original device was small. It also does not help that the largest community for sharing 3D designs is owned by the patent holder.
It seems as though you’ve confirmed that knowingly inducing infringement by sharing infringing designs would be a violation of the law, so I find it puzzling that you continue to insist that this primarily affects businesses. Certainly it affects individuals as well, yes?
I mean, I think I get what you want to mean. But you would be hard pressed to encode it in any actual rules. Unless you are just going to constantly appeal to the spirit of the rules.
I would love to see that happen here. I wasn't familiar with the Language Transfer project before, but will be trying some of their lessons now.
EDIT: ah, I was trying to remember the "Streisand Effect"
I understand there are limited resources, but if this is the only consequence that can be hoped for, there is no incentive to abandon anything.
Also, if the EFF is successful, the US patent office might use this as an example of frivolous patents that should never have been granted in the first place to resist the legislation mentioned that would make it harder to prevent such bogus patents in the first place.
In many fields you specifically research patents in order to avoid accidentally infringing on them. This is not stimulating innovation in any productive sense, it is forcing innovation where we find cumbersome workarounds because the way(s) to do a thing that work are patented and licences cost far more than they are worth.
Want to build a web site that sells things to people? Right out of the gate you have Amazon’s 1-click patent to deal with. So you need to find a way to allow people to buy stuff that doesn’t violate the 1-click patent while also making it usable for people so they can actually buy stuff.
But other "inventors" claim the whole problem, including solutions that any interviewee would have produced in twenty minutes. That's where examiners' incentives demand bad decisions.
You don't think that popular books and movies like the "Harry Potter" series helped the economy? People pay for the licensed content and entire industries are born that don't hurt anybody, and nobody is coerced to partake in it.
There was a recent HN thread about Germany's economic boom in the 19th century being largely due to no copyright law - and a huge proliferation of technical books of every description.
In the US, Hollywood was started to evade patent enforcement. Isn't it ironic how they aggressively defend IP protection now?
Copyright, for a LIMITED time (say 10 years without registration, and renewed in 10 year blocks //with// registration and steeply increasing fee) sounds like it'd be helpful to the economy as well as encourage creators of high quality content to register.
The exponentially increasing fee would also be a way of keeping actively stewarded and relevant properties under maintenance.
I also think that, similar to song covers, a maximum compelled fee for reproduction should also exist (to prevent with-holding content from the public).
An obvious example might be the brilliant novel that goes ignored by critics. If it were to easily lose copyright protection, then a producer could adapt it into a movie and pay the author nothing. But there are thousands of great novels (and many more terrible ones) for every successful one, so you need to protect all of them, and do so cheaply, in order to make sure the successful one is protected.
How the hell do you approve that, ever?
I knew when you turned me down for an amicus brief, my only hope of staying out of prison, that it was you were too busy doing more important things.
Then I see this.
Invalidating stupid patents is obviously far more important to society than writing a little note to protect the accused against rampant government misconduct and technophobia. Who needs a sixth amendment right to confrontation, anyway?
That’s definitely not what Gilmore, Barlow, and Kapor set out to do, but as I rot, at least I’ll be secure in the knowledge that patent abuse will not go unnoticed by the people I trusted in but who were too busy to help me.
Happy to answer specifics.
Basically he was nailed for wire fraud and his defense was... exotic. Upon conviction he sought a writ of certiorari so that the SCOTUS would hear his case on some pretty weird grounds.
http://mattchannon.org/petition.pdf
At a glance it seems like a situation in which someone thought they found a technicality to enact what amounted to fraud, and are pissed that the law doesn’t work like a compiler. Their response is another “I found a bug in the code” move and again, the law isn’t working like a compiler.
I don’t think making over five thousand accounts and returning tens of thousands of ink cartridges was really behavior that anyone could have thought was honest. It does seems like the government responded pretty harshly, but the system is rough. As to guilt, he would appear to be guilty, and his argument is that despite committing fraud, no one was actually hurt. That might even be true, but also not how breaking the law works.
Edit: tptacek said it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16926663
Amazing how “fabricated evidence” goes in one ear and out the other. “Of course you’re guilty- the fabricated evidence proves it!”
In the best possible light, I would assume that you believe yourself to have found a clever hack in a returns policy [1], and that what you're doing can't be fraud since everyone involved is making money off of it. But that's not really the basis of your appeal, especially not the SCOTUS petition. Instead, the thrust is more that the spreadsheet listing the amounts of what you allegedly defrauded was fabricated. Well, actually, that's not what you're appealing directly either. The appeal actually amounts to the spreadsheet could have been fabricated, so it should be excluded as evidence. That the claim being presented here is so narrow strongly prejudices me to believe that you (or at least your attorney) is conceding that you did commit fraud, and that you've got no reasonable basis to claim that the evidence is fabricated.
[1] My personal opinion of the evidence is that you in fact knew you were committing fraud when you did it, but for the sake of argument, let's assume that you were in fact innocent.
Otherwise, your advice is like telling a poor person they should have more money.
It basically boils down to: OP committed (alleged) fraud. The government used a spreadsheet populated from the defrauded's database to come to a figure for fraud, and submitted the spreadsheet as evidence. OP contends he needs access to the original database to satisfy as evidence, as a spreadsheet is potentially modifiable, but apparently doesn't allege that the data was actually modified.
Or, put another way, OP is insisting that a formatted report of SELECT * FROM table WHERE user_id=10343; should be inadmissible as evidence in court.
Money quote from the judgement: "Many of Defendants' arguments are better placed as questions concerning authentication. However, as this was not raised in the briefs, any argument to this effect was waived."
They didn’t even gave us one SQL query like that. All we got was a typo-ridden excel spreadsheet, with multiple authors, no chain of custody, no queries, and a random list of accounts that can hop state lines in minutes, and they told the courts that was how the information came out of the computer.
If that SQL query was what they actually produced, everything would be fine. We asked them for the queries they used, but they refused.
The quote is what they call “dicta”, or in passing. If you follow the cited opinions in this brief you will find them all totally inappropriate. They don’t say what the circuit judge says they say. It’s like the judge just had his clerk do it and didn’t check the work.
It won’t let me respond as fast as you all are attacking me, so you’ll have to bear with me.
Check the sound bytes under exhibit B on the evidence page to hear the author of that opinion and tell me with a straight face that he got it right.
As far as I understand the original case, you had a business running where you'd collect used printer cartridges and refund them at retailers, pocketing the refund for yourself. The retailers had a max returns-per-person policy, which you attempted to work around by... well, the details aren't clear, which means it sounds a lot like fraud (especially in the vein of https://xkcd.com/1494/). You went to trial, where (I'm assuming) the jury felt that your scheme didn't just sound like fraud, it was fraud.
That was the clear part. At that point, it looks like you objected the amount of fraud, so you demanded that the government explain how it calculated that amount. And then it seems you didn't like the answer, so you demanded that the government turn over all pertinent financial details or something like that, and on the government's refusal to do that, you're asserting that your Sixth Amendment is being violated?
I mean, even relying solely on your own evidence trying to paint you as in good a light as possible, this just sounds like a fraudster caught in the act, trying to squirm out of any consequences whatsoever. Even if this view is completely wrong, the fact that it comes across so readily is a strong indication that it isn't the best vehicle to challenge a point of law.