lostinpoetics

not to be a buzzkill, but it'd be beneficial to reduce the data set examiners (and defendants) have to sift through to find relevant prior art. speaking as an ex-examiner, that's the biggest problem, separating the signal from noise from an already poorly written data set.

a couple of nits on twistedmack's generally good response:

* a prior art search is not required (that's the PTO's job) but i usually recommend it since it'll save money in the end if there's dead on prior art. it's also required if you want to expedite the process at the PTO.

* you can file for a provisional first then have a year to file a non-provisional based off that.

on your follow up: the time process varies wildly but its in the years time scale (not months or shorter). anecdotally i just gave the PTO a call regarding an application that has been sitting around waiting for an initial response for 2.5 years now, which is somewhat uncommon but not out of the realm of possibility. you can speed up the process, but the PTO charges a rather hefty fee for it.

disclaimer: i AM a patent attorney (and former examiner), but i'm not your attorney!

a silly patent (even by design patent stds), but the complaint illustrates that this patent is a pretty small part of a [smallish] thicket of patents on the ribbon concept, as well corel pretty brazenly trying to capitalize on the Office UI (whether that is a legit claim or not is up for debate) back when MS was pushing it (and of course MS allegedly meeting with Corel to "resolve" it after finding out). personal opinion is that it may have been a compelling claim in 2007/2008, but now just gives you that slimy feeling again. another good fact (probably irrelevant) is that microsoft is now (and has been) encouraging people to use the ribbon metaphor (as far as i can tell).

if you're looking for public transportation options, this is probably the best bet. getting from NYC airports to penn station (where the Vermonter leaves from) depends on whether you fly into JFK/LGA or EWR (Newark, NJ). for JFK/LGA it's easiest to just take a cab to penn station (it's a flat rate of around 50 dollars i think, but be careful because some cabs are known to try and sucker people). if you fly into EWR you can just take the train from the airport right to penn station (NJ Transit) for much less. just be sure to build in extra time since google maps is notoriously optimistic with NYC transportation (imo)

FWIW, i used a mid-2011 2.3Ghz i5 with 8 GB of RAM for about 4 years as a lightly used dev machine (read: basically ruby/rails, pg, and sublime text with some crud stripped out and running on OS X [not server]) that also hosted about 25-30 (low bandwidth) rails apps for internal use that did a lot of text processing and never really had too many complaints. flash forward 2 years of sitting idling without any activity and it's a bit sluggish now (granted that's because i've done literally nothing on the machine other than let it run)

congrats on the launch, linking figure/element numbers to is a feature i've had on my list of features of things i'll never build for awhile. also, have recently added thumbnail search results (think google patents had this ages ago, but has since retired it if they did) and a smarter weighting of keyword search (e.g., filtering out noise from sections and boosting hits in claims/abstract/etc). would love to help out if needed (contact info in profile)

Almost certainly invalid today (as to all claims). Even before recent decisions, the method claims in particular were pretty much rejected as a matter of course (see e.g., https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=143311033686351...) (specifically the claim appendix at the bottom)

The main reason is to fund the office as it's one of the few agencies that is 100% funded by fees (versus appropriations). So much so that Congress often skims money from the fees they collect. The fact that the office is sort of set up like a traditional corp. (i.e., earning revenue, paying salaries, getting "taxed" by Congress) colors a lot of discussion on how the office operates, in my opinion. Also, the percentage of patents that are actually asserted in court is extremely small compared to the number of issued patents.

Cost. Cost is the biggest issue with post-grant proceedings. I don't know how many times I've seen people that have air-tight cases but they, understandably, won't, or can't, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars (filing fees and attorney's fees) to pull the trigger. The cost for these things is truly astronomical compared to quite literally every other aspect of the patent office. Even more astounding is that there is no reduction in fees for entity size (like almost every other fee). So a solo inventor and a Fortune 500 company pay exactly the same amount in filing fees, which is absurd and makes zero sense (even the older, reexamination route has fees based on entity size. e.g., large companies pay 12k, while "micro entities" pay 3k). I'm hoping, but not holding my breath, that eventually the fee structure will change; but given the popularity of post-grant proceedings, I can't imagine the PTO pulling the plug on a solid money maker for them. Here's a quick scatter plot of fees for micro entities, try and guess which are post-grant filing fees: http://i.imgur.com/F1Q2E1l.png

An interesting question, I would assume this would be governed by the sites TOS which usually prevents "unauthorized" use which implicates trademark issues, which in turn gives TM holders footing to petition the site to remove "offending" account names. For example, github's TOS requires "You may not use the Service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. You must not, in the use of the Service, violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright or trademark laws)." I would presume that overall most of these would be somewhat "amicable" versus domain squabbles, but that is situation-specific.

One progression is "Amazon" on twitter which appears to have been registered by an unaffiliated developer and transitioned (rather quickly) to Amazon Inc.:

https://web.archive.org/web/20071111010348/http://twitter.co... https://web.archive.org/web/20081127003135/https://twitter.c... https://web.archive.org/web/20090414074613/http://twitter.co...

Not surprisingly, Twitter's TOS at that time was almost identical to github's current TOS: "You must not, in the use of Twitter, violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright laws)."[0]

Some may also remember firefox.com having a thanks message for the domain, which is somewhat in a similar realm.[1]

In short (insert, the usual this is not legal advice disclaimer), companies would leverage existing laws (primarily, or exclusively trademark) to point out TOS breaches to service providers. The TOS provides for "termination" of an account upon breach and the account is effectively transfered to the complaining party. Depending on the parties' attitudes there may be some delay to wind things down etc, but legally the provider can presumably immediately deactivate and transfer as they see fit (subject to the TOS).

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20071030230315/http://twitter.co... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050215090602/http://www.firefo...

Agreed. I think a lot of that is based on Meteor (understandably) pushing their entire stack. I've always been intrigued by their docs which state:

  By default all apps include the meteor-platform 
  package.   This automatically pulls in the packages that 
  make up the core Meteor stack. If you want to build your 
  own custom stack, just remove meteor-platform from your 
  app and add back in whichever of the standard packages you 
  want to keep.[0]

Granted, I've always used the full stack but I'd be interested in seeing some examples of taking a more modular approach at a lower level than adding packages on top of the core stack.

[0] http://docs.meteor.com/#/full/usingpackages

can't speak to django, but i've worked with rails, node, and meteor (caveat: not "professionally," only on some personal (failed) startups)

rails: always have had pains with maintaining apps, but will always love ruby. very much stays true to its convention over configuration philosophy. if you stick to (or sometimes, can even find) the "right" way to do things, it's very smooth. if you start down a wrong path things can get painful quickly. luckily there's a lot of resources for 90% of things you'll want to do.

node/express etc.: basically the flip side of rails, a lot of doing it yourself. there's a good ecosystem but i've sometimes found myself lost in a sea of options.

meteor: last year or so i've been doing more and more stuff in the framework and it's a good mix of both of the above. it's reliant on Mongo so a lot of RDBMS techniques are useless which can cause some pain. ecosystem is pretty young so there's a lot of the node-esque soul searching.

like runjake said, i'd try each out. have found the following somewhat useful:

* ruby/sinatra: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/singing-with-sinatra--net... (express, later, was inspired by sinatra which is a quick library to learn)

* rails: http://ruby.railstutorials.org (the "definitive" starting point i suppose)

* node/express: http://scotch.io/tutorials/javascript/build-a-restful-api-us... (this is just an API but generally gets the main ideas across)

* meteor: https://www.meteor.com/install ("Discover Meteor" is the best resource to start, but it's not free)

Outside of the Rails tutorial, should probably be able to get a rough sense of each in a day

somewhat agree that it's a tough topic to start with, but regexes are one of the few things that can be immediately applied. a lot of the practice of law (esp. early in your career) is pretty mundane and repetitive stuff. couple that with attorneys love of OCR, you get a lot of copy/paste/hours of editing workflow that can easily be solved by a quick find and replace with a handful of regular expressions. (you could also argue that the root cause e.g., storage mechanism, should be changed, but often times that is a nonstarter or at least heavily resisted)

edit: also, a lot of services like westlaw/lexis have a very rudimentary type of regex searching capacity (i think just * and some connectors) so it's not 100% foreign to many lawyers

to be honest though, most attorneys need training in basic desktop publishing software to start with. i've seen things done in microsoft word that no man or woman should ever have to see.

agreed. a close second is the confusion between a published application and an issued patent.

while the decision is pretty tightly tailored, it seems like it's SCOTUS' way of opening the door for subsequent arguments regarding pure software patents. take google's page rank patent[1]. one could argue that assigning scores to, say, academic papers based on references cited and then doing that repeatedly is an "abstract idea" and google's recitation of "apply[ing] it" using a computer is not enough to enter into patent eligible subject matter. if you read/listen to the oral argument, the counter argument that doing so on a massive scale is impracticable was flatly rejected. indeed, a million monkeys counting the citations of scholarly pubs could probably perform that method on a decent sized corpus. is the method therefore inherently abstract? will be interesting to see if Alice alters the analysis (albeit slightly) for these types of questions and whether we'll see a pure software issue (without the negative financial/business method clouds in the background) sooner rather than later.

[1] http://www.google.com/patents/US6285999

generally agree. however, 10k is a pretty high estimate unless you want to patent something extremely complex or in operate in a complicated area (generally limited to SC fab or pharma with some others along those lines). most small to mid-sized firms will be more in the 2-5k range, although it will vary depending on location etc.

also, many (most?) firms will charge a flat rate for certain services (e.g., drafting and filing) or a capped hourly rate (e.g., $250/hr but no more than $3000). something to keep in mind if an attorney insists on an uncapped hourly rate (which, i hope, would be rare).

[edit: after filing attorneys will also charge for responding/arguing with the patent office. this part ('prosecution') usually varies firm to firm but often is very similar (e.g., a set fee for each type of response, which there should only be a few of)]

while this isn't 100% inaccurate, one major headache are vague rulings from SCOTUS. the "reasonable certainty" test is a good example as well as their "abstract means abstract" pseudo-standards. while SCOTUS paints with a broad brush (rightfully so), many of their decisions are borderline meaningless other than to say to the CAFC "no you're wrong," which results in multiple rounds of these type of decisions (often on the same issues, or variations of them). that being said, the closeness of the CAFC to the bar is quite troubling and the e-mails that Rader sent to attorneys who argued in front of him were pretty embarrassing for all involved.

My main concern with these bond requirement bills (of which there have been many, most notably the SHIELD act introduced by DeFazio and Chaffetz) is the creation of "super trolls" due to smaller trolls offloading assets since litigation would no longer be as profitable. Such a troll would easily be able to show "that it has and will have the ability to pay the accused infringer’s fees and other expenses if ordered to do so," and while the other factors may be considered, I can see this one being determinative. So you flush out a slew of smaller trolls and give somewhat of windfall to existing, larger trolls. Although this is all hypothetical and perhaps having a few "big" targets is easier to deal with in the long run.

> In many situations, people with legitimate claims have been unable to overcome the heightened pleading standard, not because their claim is weak, but because the evidence required to plead the claim is difficult to come by.

the "unless the information is not reasonable [sic] accessible" really takes a lot of the teeth out of this though