patents

Hooray!

"Reversing a longstanding policy, the federal government said on Friday that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature. The new position could have a huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/business/30drug.html?_r=1&hp

Their patent warchests were supposed to provide Mutually Assured Destruction, peace for all... it begins...

Want a great way to shutdown a market?  Allow a company to patent a safety mechanism and charge whatever they want for licensing, then allow successful lawsuits against other companies for not including said safety mechanism.  Besides which, it's a friggin table saw, morons!  It cuts things!  Don't stick your finger in it!

http://techdirt.com/articles/20100318/1240568623.shtml

Interesting article about reducing copyright duration to 7 years from 20, and even more interesting comments arguing for complete abandonment of the concept of patenting concepts...

Article:

Another example of stupid patents - letting users configure privacy settings:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/bal-bz.facebook24sep24,0,5315456....

Why is "associating a piece of data with multiple categories" a patentable innovation???  Does that mean it's illegal to cross-reference things in a book index?  It seems like "inventor" has come to mean "one who takes an age-old idea and adds the phrase 'web-based computing platform' to it."  The actual patent in question (http://www.google.com/patents?id=Ay99AAAAEBAJ&dq=7139761) seems to be specific to user-generated data and the associated metadata.  The way I read it, it seems that everything from wikipedia to carlsonhome.net infringes, great.

A method for splitting up a bill at a restaurant... I think I violated this ~10 times in the last month - great innovation, IBM!

I just read about a photographer who made a circuit to remotely trigger his camera using standard family walkie-talkies:

http://www.robertbenson.com/blog/archives/860

While this is neat and it looks like he did a good job implementing it, I was surprised and disappointed to see he decided to persue a patent for it.  Not only is this a fairly obvious idea, it's not even unique... it's even been a project in Make magazine (http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol15/?pg=153).  Rather than trying to create a false monopoly for himself, it would have been nice if he'd followed the lead of Mitch Altman and others in the open-source hardware movement: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/11/patentbgone_inventor_mitc.html . He could still make some money off of producing this for people, but he could also benefit from the free ideas for improvements from other gearheads.