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Re: philosophical question about sharing information

Whether or not a patent is issued erroneously, it's contents may be discussed without infringment.

Copyright covers patterns and style. If you cannot use the idea profitably without copying board art, schematic sections, magnetic core and winding structures, physical layout, and package shape, then you don't understand the techniques and issues involved sufficiently to avoid copyright infringement.

Explain your issue please. When I offer a suggestion professionally, I will explain why it might work (and to what degree), when it last did work and where, as well as where the first instance of where it was used, to my knowledge. If anyone asks me about a certain feature of a design, I'm prepared to do the same. If there is greater interest or a disputation as to source, further information and supporting documentation may be required.

The pros and cons of specific embodiments are the normal fodder of a design review.

Although there no obligation to do so on usenet, most posters will respond to really interested parties with similar information.

Is this more understandable?

Explain please.

RL

Reply to
legg
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Of course. A patent is a public document. It is invalid if it does not teach someone "skilled in the art" all that is needed to make the process or device work.

If something isn't your idea or design, don't you know where it came from? It is not incumbent on me do determine that a device is patented beyone looking for the patent number or "Patent Pending" on the device itself. It is no crime to use a patented technique. The patent owner may sue (if he notices), but that's not a criminal matter.

Yes.

A patent application of mine was once rejected on the ground that it was "obvious to one skilled in the art". I contested the rejection, pointing out that however obvious it might seem after it was shown, my method cost $0.20 while the prevailing practice -- "the state of the art", as it were -- cost $175. The patent was granted.

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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Reply to
Jerry Avins

I had a patent rejected once. I replied to the examiner's comments, "You're just too dumb to understand it".

The patent was granted ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
         America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
Reply to
Jim Thompson

You don't anything much beyond whining, complaining, and making a spectacle of yourself. USPTO wouldn't hire you to take out the garbage...

Reply to
Fred Bloggs

It would be nice to think that individuals are that organized; that they can always recognize sources for their thought processes. Unfortunately, original ideas are often proven, in fact, to be memories. A property search may clear that up, or at least let you know that, wherever your idea came from, it's not been previously documented.

I think there may be some ambiguity in the term 'use' here. If there's no commercial use, misreprsentaion or undermining of a (potential) commercial use, then there's hardly likely to be an issue - but just being small doesn't get you off the hook.

Fiddling and improving on others work is pretty standard behaviour. You can even purchase products that legally employ the patented property and use them as educational short-cuts, though that's a good way of turning your own talents to gorgonzola.

The exact meaning of 'criminal matters' or their relationship to the action of processing a Suite in Law are outside my area of expertise, and pretty much off-topic.

Perhaps you should have emphasized the materials and methods' differences from the prior art more clearly in your initial submission, if it was the main point of the invention.

Well, there's always next time.

RL

Reply to
legg

...

...

You take the cake! One of RCA's lawyers wrote my letter for me.

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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Reply to
Jerry Avins

How might I have done that? I replaced a board-level state machine with two exclusive-OR gates. My invention also allowed a 100-line rotary encoder with a 50-line one at the same resolution, but it didn't require that.

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Reply to
Jerry Avins

It depends.

Taking the HVAC example, let's say all that's needed is a new electrolytic capacitor for the condenser fan. (I had to change one of those, a few years back.) Not everyone would be comfortable with shutting down the 220V power, removing the capacitor, taking notes which wire went where, buying the replacement, installing it, re- wiring it, and powering it up.

Then again, some people probably shouldn't operate a toaster.

Given the knowledge, it's up to the person to decide if s/he can do it; if not, hire a pro, and spend the couple hundred bucks.

Giving up patentable information however isn't wise.

Michael

-- Consider: A million and a half new Americans are murdered every year by abortion. No other issue involves numbers that high. Nothing short of a full-scale nuclear or biological war between well-armed nation states would kill that many people, and we aren=92t in imminent danger of having one of those. Jobs? The economy? Taxes? Education? The environment? Immigration? Forget it. We do not have nine million people dying in a typical president=92s term of office due to bad job programs, bad economic policies, bad taxes, bad education, bad environmental law, bad immigration rules=97or even all of these combined. All of them together cannot provide a reason proportionate to the need to end abortion. Make no mistake: Abortion is the preeminent moral issue of our time. It is the black hole that out- masses every other issue. Presenting any other issues as if they were proportionate to it is nothing but smoke and mirrors.

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Reply to
mrdarrett

I'm sure you've been in a situation where your boss or co-worker will go through the process of explaining something to you, with complete sincerity, that you only recently finished explaining to him or her.

We all want to think we're on the ball, or to at least look good in our sunglasses. It's only natural, I guess.

Believe me, if you do have a useful and original idea, you'll probably remember the wheres or whens about it. It's not likely your boss or co-worker was walking the dog with you, or ripping up your nth breadboard with you at the time, either....but that doesn't mean you didn't read something similar, in passing, six months previously.

RL

Reply to
legg

It can be, just to keep somebody else from patenting it. IBM has a public disclosure site where they do just that.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

I don't disclose for fear that a client will want to claim a patent. So I just use an idea in multiple chips and document it well in my own archives.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
         America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
Reply to
Jim Thompson

The proposed new patent laws change from "first to invent" to "first to file." But I think a public disclosure still kills any rights to patent.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

The problem has not come up yet, but I think a chip _is_ public disclosure ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
         America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
Reply to
Jim Thompson

...

Consider: if contraception were freely available to all -- free, even -- there would be much less incentive for abortion. Global warming and resource depletion are fundamental problems, but they are driven by overpopulation.

Consider: for every person alive when I was born, there four people alive today. The global carbon footprint and resource demand would be a quarter of what it is if that lower population had been maintained. How will we fare in twenty years when world population has doubled again?

Consider: morality amounts to a code of conduct that leads individuals to value the greater good more highly than their private wants. By that standard, restricting access to contraception is clearly immoral.

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Reply to
Jerry Avins

Here?

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My goodness, they charge a fee just to look...

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is free

Michael

-- Consider: A million and a half new Americans are murdered every year by abortion. No other issue involves numbers that high. Nothing short of a full-scale nuclear or biological war between well-armed nation states would kill that many people, and we aren=92t in imminent danger of having one of those. Jobs? The economy? Taxes? Education? The environment? Immigration? Forget it. We do not have nine million people dying in a typical president=92s term of office due to bad job programs, bad economic policies, bad taxes, bad education, bad environmental law, bad immigration rules=97or even all of these combined. All of them together cannot provide a reason proportionate to the need to end abortion. Make no mistake: Abortion is the preeminent moral issue of our time. It is the black hole that out- masses every other issue. Presenting any other issues as if they were proportionate to it is nothing but smoke and mirrors.

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Reply to
mrdarrett

I don't think so, it's just an embodiment, and requires a lot of effort to reverse engineer. Similarly, making an object file available for use does not "disclose" the algorithms contained therein.

But to the previous point, defensive disclosure is a pretty common strategy. Many companies "publish" technology descriptions in obscure journals strictly as a defensive move to prevent others from obtaining patents.

Eric Jacobsen Minister of Algorithms Abineau Communications

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Reply to
Eric Jacobsen

But it _is_ prior art that was missed in the search ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
         America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
Reply to
Jim Thompson

That makes you just about 100 years old. Congratulations!

John

Reply to
John Larkin

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"As others before the Fonda-Turner team, the basis for the heavy promotion of birth control has been the so-called overpopulation of the world. Let us take a brief scientific, cold and factual look at that.

The world population projected for the year 2,000 is ca. 6.5 billion inhabitants. The entire surface area of Mexico is 1,972,000 sq.km. Let us now do some simple arithmetic.

Using only half of the area of Mexico (ca. 986,000 sq.km) as the living space for the entire world population, then, the population density would be ca. 6,600 inhabitants per sq.km. Since one square kilometer (sq.km) will yield 7,200 parcels of 1,250 square feet each we may quickly see that these number will result in less than one inhabitant per 1,250 square feet parcel. An ample one bedroom apartment has an average living area of only 800 square feet!

This leaves 50% of the area of Mexico and the remaining land mass of our planet for other uses besides lodging. This hardly seems to be overloading our planet."

At 7 billion people today, I calculate 3000 sq ft per person (assuming everyone in the world is crammed into an area the size of Mexico), leaving the entire rest of the world free for agricultural use.

Michael

Reply to
mrdarrett

Unfortunately not. I'm a mere 75; that's all the time quadrupling took. (That despite wars, famines, and annihilations for ethnic cleansing.)

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Reply to
Jerry Avins

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