Programming used to be female-dominated, only a mere 60 years ago. More importantly, modern humans first appeared around 300,000 years ago, while "tech" careers have been around for only a mere eyelash of a blink of that time. It strains credulity to say that there's an inherent biological sex difference due to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that is (a) that strong and pervasive throughout the population to have the effect we see today, and (b) flipped in only the past two generations.

So you have an example of these businesses that were male dominated but now have first-class female workers that can't be argued with or contradicted?

That's his point - there are tons of ways to be an outright nuisance that are nonetheless safe. SWATting carries the possibility of death. It'd be closer to calling in a bomb threat... and also planting a bomb.

And, in fact, it did turn out different - in Autodesk v. Vernor, the 9th circuit determined that purchasers of AutoCAD were licensees, not owners, and therefore the first sale doctrine didn't apply and those licenses could not be resold.

Yes, but otoh, you have no idea what that new drug will do. Pharma patent attorneys describe their field as an "unpredictable" art, and they're not wrong - there's a famous patent infringement case from around 2008 that involved a drug that had a benzene ring with a compound hanging off of it. If it hung off at position 1, it was an okay drug (and was the subject of the patent). If you move it to position 2, it was a great drug (made by the accused infringer). But if you moved it to position 3, it was deadly. Same compound, just different position on one portion of the molecule. The court said that because of its unpredictable effect, the small change wasn't an obvious variation, so they didn't infringe.

So, yeah, an AI could say "here's an input molecule, I'll create a list of every variation of that molecule." But you wouldn't actually know what they did until you tested them, and you can't patent something without knowing its use.

Patent system is temporary innovation blocking* for a very good reason - to destroy trade secrets, which can last forever. Before patents, you had the guild system and patronage, and new technology was heavily locked down and restricted to guild members. There's a reason those were called the dark ages, and that the patent system coincided with the beginning of the age of enlightenment.

*it's not really innovation blocking, but innovation encouraging, since if you come up with an improvement on someone else's patent, you can get a patent on the improvement. It's really implementation blocking - and specifically, temporarily blocking you from implementing what someone else invented and published.

Crank out dozens of patent applications using your AI in a bunch of unrelated fields to troll? Or, for the somewhat less evil answer, crank out and publish millions of inventions that you claim the AI "invented" in order to keep others from patenting them.

The latter was tried about 3-4 years ago in a very simple manner, with someone using a computer to build a library of invention disclosures. The problem was that it was unintelligent - they literally grabbed sentences from random existing patents and combined them together, so it would say things like "Tab A may be inserted in to Slot B in some embodiments. The benzene ring may have a carboxl group attached. A network bridge may connect the devices. Dosage may be 2g/kg body weight." While that implementation sucked (and was pointless anyway, since the source for each sentence was already prior art patents), there's at least a philosophical argument for something like that.

Not at all, this is the judiciary following the letter of the law as written.

Programmers should appreciate this result. "Fish" is defined to include "invertebrates" without limitation. "Bees" are "invertebrates". Therefore, "bees" are "fish". If "fish" was defined only as "aquatic invertebrates", that wouldn't include "bees", but it wasn't.

The legislature, if they didn't intend this, is free to amend the law to exclude terrestrial vertebrates. The judiciary, however, is following the law as written.

Your proposal would actually be judicial activism: the judiciary saying "yes, the law was written this way, but we don't believe that's what the legislature intended, so we're going to rule against it (and tell the legislature to fix it, if they want)." Ignoring the letter of the law in favor of their belief in the intent is judicial activism, by definition.

It's Slashdot, don't try to figure it out.

Except that hardly anyone applies for patents in Russia. Questionable enforcement, and not too big a market. Most companies target the US, Germany, and then depending on industry, China, Japan, South Korea, France, the UK, Canada, India, and Australia. Russia doesn't make the top 10 list, according to WIPO.

Patents haven't been lengthened for decades, and most patents expire long before their full term because companies don't want to pay the maintenance fees. Maybe you're thinking of copyright?

Yeah, and that will hurt them a lot more. Not many non-Russian companies seek patents in Russia because the market is relatively small and legal protection is uncertain at best. But many Russian companies get patents in the US and Europe.

For instance, from the 2021 WIPO report on IP statistics, only 20% of Russian Federation patent applications were from foreign nationals, compared to 55% in the US.

These are two treaties that Russia entered into decades ago, and it appears they're denouncing both. Both treaties have provisions for disputes that allow countries to seek sanctions before the International Court of Justice, but there are other possible implications - such as other countries refusing to recognize Russian nationals for IP protection. The results of that could last decades.

I believe they're filing amicus briefs on Epic's appeal from the Epic v. Apple suit. But article is poorly written.