bdowling

Someone who has no basis to bring a patent infringement claim selling a settlement of such a claim to an alleged infringer is clearly fraud.

It’s like someone selling a deed to land they don’t own, or leasing a property they don’t own to a tenant.

At least in the U.S., anyone can look up all the patents a person/entity owns. So, your fraud wouldn’t get very far.

https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/patent/searc...

Cincinnati, Ohio is also named after George Washington, albeit indirectly. https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2022/09/06/who-was-cin...

Bridgestone, the Japanese tire manufacturer, is named after its founder, Shojiro Ishibashi. His surname means “stone bridge”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgestone

You don’t need textbooks. Most textbooks are garbage.

This announcement was prompted in part by an AI activist named Stephen Thaler (referenced in the article), who sued for AIs to be recognized as inventors and authors. His goal was to give certain moral rights to AIs.

At the time, that seemed mostly harmless. Now, however, the idea of giving rights to AIs seems like a bad idea.

Try “Moshi-moshi?” for a Japanese flavor.

That is basically what governments are for, collective actions that make land more valuable: roads, schools, police, fire departments, and civil engineering projects.

The problem is that the city relies on property tax revenues to function.

> the next person who buys it

If they can’t build on it, who would buy it? Urban farmers?

In any case, your plan would destroy the land value, and the corresponding property tax revenue.

> No, wtfh1971 isn’t arguing that divorce has to do with wage changes, because he’s too stupid to get that relation.

This is the exact point where the mean-spiritedness of the article surpassed my interest in continuing to read it.

You could try going on an adventure, ideally a real one that is a little bit dangerous.

For every well-engineered application used by millions of users, you've got thousands of poorly-engineered, bespoke applications in use by one or two users (often internal corporate tools or expensive middleware with minimal customization besides changing the corporate branding).

"Pokemon-style game made with JavaScript and p5.js" would probably do just as well.

> "… do not put my name on it or associate it with me in any way."

If you invented it, then they have to put your name on the application as the inventor. There’s also a declaration that the inventor is supposed to sign as part of the application. If the inventor is dead or otherwise unavailable (e.g., refuses to sign), there’s an alternative form that can be filed.

This is great info.

As a follow-up, it looks like Masimo is trying to make a consumer watch-like device (or possibly just pretending to so they look like a competitor to Apple). https://www.masimopersonalhealth.com/

For the record, my guess is that there is no copyright in a scan of a copyright-ineligible work, because a scan is not a work of “authorship”. Unlike a photograph, which requires various authorial choices that reflect the photographer’s expressive intent, a scan is a mechanical and often completely automatic process.

I think the author missed the point of CGI. The point being that the web server doesn’t parse anything, it just passes the request to the CGI program via environment variables and standard input/output.

Whether you have a copyright to a scan of a copyright-ineligible work isn’t a question that has been tested in court, as far as I know.

A copyright-ineligible work, however, can sometimes be protected by contract. Here, the restriction on the web page may be because the web site agreed with the scanning entity not to distribute a high-resolution version online.

That would be the obvious solution, but it’s not surprising they couldn’t agree on a price when they operate in very different industries. Masimo makes medical devices, ones whose prices are probably both high and skewed by insurance. Apple is a consumer devices company and may not be able to justify a high royalty price and still meet certain consumer price points. Another possibility is that Apple’s watches may be an alternative to Masimo’s expensive, high-margin devices, so a licensing deal could destroy Masimo’s entire business in the long run. So, coming to an agreement on price may have been impossible.

If you are actually sued for patent infringement, then it means you've got deep pockets to pay a judgment or settlement. In other words, you're probably making a ton of money. It's a good position to be in.

Yes. In a well-written claim, then each limitation is only there because it was necessary to get the examiner to allow the patent (i.e., to be valid in light of the known prior art).

> some parts of them seem to definitely be a prior art

The standard is to consider ALL of the elements together in the specific configuration. If this were not the case, then any invention that incorporated any conventional element (e.g., a lever) would be invalid.

As I understand it, CAFE standards require small footprint trucks to meet an unreasonably high MPG rating or else pay taxes/fines. Large footprint trucks have a more realistic MPG requirement. Therefore all trucks are large trucks.

Here’s the first article I found when I googled the issue. https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/10/how-cafe-killed-co...

Historically, here’s how it works: Suppose the police come to your door and say, “Hi, we’re investigating your neighbor for a crime and we would like to see the footage from your security camera for the last few days.” At that point, you can choose whether you share the records with the police. It’s up to you. You may demand to see a search warrant, but you do not need to. Your neighbor does not get a say in whether you help the police.

Here, the same pattern applies, but the scale of cooperation is staggering. “Quantity has a quality all its own,” on steroids. In the case of AT&T, their cooperation includes trillions of records and affects literally everyone who has used a phone since 1987.

The issue, according to the article, is not whether voluntary sharing of records is constitutional, but whether the public should have a right to know the details of how the system works.

The image of Muhammad Ali taunting Sonny Liston to get back up is one of the most famous images in sports. I can’t imagine how much it cost to license.

I don't have any insider knowledge that the linked post is true, but it seems plausible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349969

Even if there isn't anything explicit, there may be an implicit promise that a strategic partner won't share all the company secrets with the partner's competitors.

> the other 20% would represent a pivot to an "open source" model like the name once implied

Or they would be triggering a billion-dollar lawsuit that would surely bankrupt the company.

Which they still do in many, many cases.

If judges start to throw out non-compete agreements that don’t have separate compensation (apart from usually salary/experience), then you will just see companies explicitly write their contracts such that that X dollars are explicitly for the non-compete agreement.

At least in some industries, however, there is a consumer protection/public policy argument against non-compete agreements, where: (1) there is no legitimate property interest to protect (e.g., the “trade secrets” held by the companies aren’t trade secrets at all because every company in the industry knows them), and (2) it is bad for consumers/against public policy to allow companies to use non-compete agreements to stifle competition where there is no legitimate property interest to protect.