I think it would be useful if there was a patent type for "free for anyone to use", something like the MIT License in open source. This would make it easier for patent officers to discover and reject applications conflicting with prior free to use patents and offload the burden of keeping track of this from the inventor to the patent office.
Well it used to be that no action was necessary to prevent someone from patenting something you've already invented and released publicly: The first person to invent it had the right to patent or not patent it, and nobody else.
A few years ago we switched to a "first-to-file" system and this is a direct consequence of that. Someone who didn't invent something can now file a patent. Doing so is a lengthy, expensive process, so the immediate consequence is there is no more "public domain" inventing.
A public disclosure by a first inventor prevents a later inventor from receiving a patent on the same invention. Even if that publication happened only one day before you file your application and you had no chance to be influenced by it at all, you will not get a patent (or it will be held invalid).
Saying that first-to-file means a non-inventor can lawfully obtain a patent is also wrong. It seems to imply that a new, non-obvious invention can only be made by one person at a time. This is not true in competitive industries where many people are working to solve the same problems and will often come up with the same new solutions independently. First-to-file encourages them to apply for their patents early.
There is such a thing as "public domain" inventing, as you call it. It is simply done by (1) inventing, (2) publishing, and (3) not applying for a patent.
False. A recent U.S. decision holds that such a disclosure must be well known to practitioners of the art, not just known to a few! Publication is no longer sufficient.
You do have to lie and say you thought of it independently; something impossible to disprove. The number of people who'd lie for big money is... innumerable.
You can patent ideas thousands of years old - if they're not well known to practitioners.
You're right that any publication will not be sufficient. A publication needs to be discoverable by the practitioners of the relevant art. However, it does not need to be well-known to them, nor does it need to be actually known by any of them. It only needs to be reasonably discoverable.
Absolutely. The first to file system greatly disadvantages individual and/or poorly funded inventors, because for big corporations, the cost to file is no great hurdle.
Flip side: first to file arose because first to invent is inherently ambiguous. The fixed cost of a filing was deemed better than the large and unknowable cost of determining who invented what when through the courts.
Proof of independent creation might be; but similarity provides a statistical test of that. Cases use similarity and probability, they don't take "independent creators" at their word.
I'm not saying the system is perfect, but there is a reason we switched to the current system.
If I've invented widgets (or think that I've invented widgets), I should be able to know if I can patent and sell them, without years later getting sued because someone once did it in their basement and left it at that.
First to invent doesn't automatically mean they can sue when you file your own patent and intend to sell - they have to file their own patent first, and if you've already published enough of the invention before they even filed, then that only means neither side gets a patent (original inventor because they can't wait until after publication to file, second inventor because they were late).
Also, first to file has the same problem you mention. You can invent something, never publish, and get sued by somebody who reinvented it later.
I agree with you, however, I think the difficult part is finding an entity capable of enforcing such a patent. I mean, we have things like the EFF or Apache foundation, but what organization could manage such a patent type? There would have to be enough trust in a granting body of such a patent, and it would need to be able to operate unencumbered for the global public good. I think this is an interesting problem worth solving though, if it can be.
Very hard to manage given that publication is no longer enough - the average practitioner has to be aware of that publication, or it doesn't count, according to a recent U.S. decision.
You can just publish your invention and how to make it if you want it to be part of the prior art. Then, in theory, the patent examiners should find it when examining patents. Of course, making sure they actually find the relevant prior art is part of the problem.
Isn’t this exactly just the job of licensing? With favourable licensing, it seems to me (IANAL) the patenting is just defence for us all, keeping a less-sharing third party from patenting and locking-down a process or implementation.
No. Patents grant a monopoly for a limited time and there is no compulsory licensing regime for patents. Many patent-owners do license their inventions, but others don't.
I think we’re saying the same thing. The licensing isn’t compulsory, but if ONE CHOOSES to license liberally, those are the terms of use. A benevolent actor could patent a thing, freely license, and head off another actor that would patent-and-lock-down.
It's not necessary to spend the money to obtain a patent in order to prevent others from patenting an invention. All you need to do is make the invention available by publishing it somewhere discoverable by the relevant public. The publication doesn't need to be in an academic journal either. A recent case found that a message on Usenet was sufficiently public because Usenet is organized hierarchically into newsgroups on various topics. A blog post would also probably suffice, so long as it's indexed by a search engine.
Looking at the two repos it's not clear to me whether it's even a fork or not. The issue owner didn't state which files he thinks are forked from the Gemstash repo. Also, MIT license is a permissive license and does allow sub-licensing, so his comment that you cannot change the license is not entirely correct. However the intern should have kept the original MIT license along with the Apache license, adding a note that MIT license only applies to specific portion of the project (that is, if he forked that repository in the first place..)
I suspect the biggest reason this is happening is there's no healthcare in U.S. and retirees simply have to account for that. Who will help pay the hospital bills of the "educated spenders" with no money when they get a serious disease?
I believe Snapchat founders also agree with you, which is why they rushed to IPO as soon as Instagram and Facebook released stories. In a few months when the lockout period expires and employees are able to sell their stocks, I expect to watch the stock tumble to never come back up..
>employees are able to sell their stocks, I expect to watch the stock tumble to never come back up
You expect the employees to start dumping their stock at fire-sale prices? Otherwise, how do prices tumble in a market? The buyer and seller have to agree on price.
Lol. Everyone thinks they can predict the stock market and no one else can. Like only they know about the lockout period and the hordes of shareholders buying it today at $20 have no idea a drop in a few months is near-inevitable.
Lockout period ending is not necessarily a problem with IPOs. However, a rushed IPO where fundamentals can't justify the valuation, already slowing growth story and risk of envelopment by Facebook's Instagram stories; these are some serious red flags.
I'm sure there is all sorts of financial wisdom I'm unaware of in this space, but I would expect most employees to lock in a decent bit of real cash value at lock out while still maintaining some stake in hopes of future appreciation. If you've been trading real money for paper money for some number of years it seems that the rationale move would be to lock in some non-trivial gains.
I think Snapchat is currently already overpriced, so I don't agree with your comments that it's fire sale prices, but only time will tell :) Note that I don't own any long or short position on the stock.
My point is that unless those employees choose to sell their stock at below market prices (for whatever reason), then market prices won't budge. Stock prices don't fall because lots of people decide to sell; people are selling stock all day, every day, yet prices rise. It's all about that price and company prospects.
> Stock prices don't fall because lots of people decide to sell; people are selling stock all day, every day, yet prices rise. It's all about that price and company prospects.
In fact stock prices frequently fall because lots of people decide to sell. You're positing a premise that only exists in theory, and will never actually occur in fact as it pertains to the stock market. If you dramatically increase the number of sellers, the stock will go down. The sellers don't just sit there, holding their ask, they lower their ask to try to get out of the stock they want to sell. That incremental process, lowers the stock, and then lowers it some more, and then keeps lowering it. More selling interest than buying is exactly what causes stocks like Twitter to plunge off a cliff.
Your premise is that the wave of sellers are just all going to hold their ask prices firm (rather than competing and lowering their ask to get their shares sold). That has never happened and will never happen in actual trading.
I agree with you that only employees selling won't make it crash or anything, and I don't expect any big investors to sell; however unless they come up with a solid ad-monetization + continued growth strategy I expect it to follow TWTR's pattern leading up to the lockup (Jan-Apr 2014 -40%) and go even lower shortly afterwards (May 2014 -20%).
While I didn't have terrible experience comparable to some recent events, I also want to share mine. Last year when I was flying United I printed my boarding pass from one of the kiosks at the airport, and it assigned me to a seat where there's slightly more legroom, normally I believe these are upgrade seats, but I assumed there's no other seats so it gave me that one. After I and several others boarded the plane, one of the agents comes to me and wants to see my boarding pass. At this point it's a little awkward for him to ask for this but OK whatever, I give him my pass and he walks off with it without saying a thing. A minute or two later he comes back and gives it back to me and doesn't give me any explanation why he asked for it in the first place. 5 minutes later another agent comes to me and says in a rude manner I sat in someone else's seat and asking me to leave that seat. Well guess what, the first agent swapped my boarding pass with a different one before returning it to me. I didn't make a big fuss about it but let them know that I knew what they did. In fact I'd be fine if they just explained the situation and said there's been an error with the seat assignment. They're not just violent and inconsiderate but also very good con artists..good job losing a customer for good..
O_O, so let me get this clear—the first agent literally changed your seat assignment on their own and gave you a new boarding pass with a new seat number without telling you anything?
They didn't "change" anything. That would mean it was a mistake of omission in informing him.
They stole his boarding pass, replaced it with another one, lied to him about sitting in the wrong seat. This was done in the hope he'd be stupid enough to think he misread his boarding pass.
I'm not sure how official such a document is, but he might've even be able to sue them for forgery or at least fraud.
I've always printed two boarding passes and kept them in my carry on. I've had gate agents walk away with my boarding pass in the past and simply never return.
yes I've thought about this as well after the event, now I keep a printed copy in my pocket and use the one on my phone in case something like this happens again (on a different airline)
This is simply not true for all tech companies. I've had instances where I said no due to asks being not in line with company policies and we changed course to tackle the problem another way. I work at Microsoft and there's severe rules against retaliation should your boss penalize you for something like this.
I'd also call myself an introvert, and the best productivity I get is when I dedicate a couple of days working from home with the rest in office. This allows me to get the bulk load of work done when I'm home and allow some social interaction with my colleagues the rest of the week, while still getting a decent amount of work done. It's consistently the same days every week that I work from home, so people I work with can have their expectations set on when I'll be around. Choosing random days does not really work well for this, as people get confused when I'm not there.
Remarkably KI is gentle on the body while still doing a great job purifying water of the most common foul bacteria and fungus.
This seems like it would make no sense until you stop to consider that idea that in earlier generations of man we ate on average a lot more marine plants than we do today (kelp in particular) which are rich in Potassium Iodide. People ate kelp because it was a "low hanging fruit" so to speak, easily harvested in great quantity from the sea. Perhaps the beneficial organisms in our gut evolved to tolerate KI so that populations could tolerate eating mostly seaweed.
The Japanese still eat a lot of kelp (the average japanese male ingests more than 40mg of KI daily from seaweed), and if you crunch the statistics it looks like they may have significantly less AD among their population than we do in the west:
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alzheimers...
Not everybody lived nearby a sea. My family is from the north west of Argentina (Jujuy). To reach the sea you have to travel a few hundred kilometers horizontally and more than one kilometer vertically, so bringing anything from the sea was very expensive.
Moreover, the iodine content of the food was very low and that's bad for your thyroid. The government mandate to add a small amount of KI to the table salt NaCl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency
Exposing an AWS key through a public repo happened to me a few years ago and AWS support called me to confirm whether I was aware of the suspicious activity, when I stated I do not know what's going on they immediately blocked the account and told me I wouldn't be responsible for the cost. Mine was actually much worse, the account was billing a thousand dollars every hour. They told me I'd have to sign up again with a different account.. I'm surprised this process was not followed in author's case.
