We are in violent agreement that AMD's ownership claim wasn't disputed. They only only had to decide S3 didn't have any rights in the matter. I read the rest of it as dealing with the administrivia of getting the case off their docket. You can almost feel the ITC's disgust towards S3 oozing through. I wonder if Apple will seek sanctions against S3.

Sorry for inferring that you didn't read the finding before posting. I conflated your response with the plethora of uninformed ones. I apologize for that.

The bits about AMDs motion is in the second to last paragraph.

The actual finding

Anyways, give it a read before discussing what it says.

but wait, this is slashdot, rtfa? nah

Every venue statute I've ever read makes it fine to sue anyone/anything on the defendant's own turf. For federal law, check 28 USC 1391.

For patent cases against corporations, check 28 USC 1400(b) and see how it relates to 28 USC 1391(c). Basically, you can file a patent infringement suit against a corporation like microsoft in any federal district court..

Laws get changed when the right people (corporations) scream loudly enough. If you really believe that 'big corporations' can send out false DMCA takedown notices without a meaningful penalty, then the solution is simple. Send them your own. If the penalty is all that light then it won't bother you. This is obviously not legal advice, a recommendation, or a call to action.

Whoever related this to the SCO litigation is closer than he knows. The timezone database has been widely hosted and replicated - most notably on *.gov servers. A finding of copyright infringement could allow the plaintiff to collect against all sorts of entities - including the US government. I also suspect that statutory damages are possible. So, winning this case would be a massive massive payday.

The defenses include that the data itself is factual and that the atlas data itself has been used openly and notoriously for so many years that the copyright is extinguished by laches. Something that can add strength to the defense is that the form (as in formatting, data storage, etc.) of the factual data is different.

Regardless of all that, this case could get pushed pretty far through the appeals process. Those US government pockets are deep are about as deep as they get. Someone also mentioned IBM's bug squashing abilities. Has the database been hosted off a *.ibm.com location?

For those wanting to check out the case law, the place to start is:
Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)

In a more open source centric mode, has anyone thrown down a web site for gathering timezone info?

The FCC already has a ruling on this:
http://www.fcc.gov/guides/digital-cable-compatibility-cablecard-ready-devices

It's kinda like the way it was with telephones. People could own their own but it took literally over a decade before it really caught on. I know you could buy your own phone back in the late 1970's. However, the telcos were making pretty good money off rentals until at least the early 1990's. Lots of people just kept renting.

On the other hand, those old phones were very well engineered and were meant to last decades. You could bludgeon someone with an old bell telephone and then use it to call an ambulance.

Yes, daedae has it right except for a few omissions. A patent that issued in 1990 would indeed be expired today, so you don't have to worry about that patent. However, there may be later patents, perhaps even a submarine patent, lurking in wait for you. Furthermore, you are never safe from patent trolls.

Copyright is probably your biggest issue though. Simply rewriting the code doesn't always work unless you take some type of positive step to ensure that the new code is "clean". For example, do not just go through the old code changing variable names and cleaning things up here and there. The folks that do clean implementations 'for real' will actually hire programmers and give them specifications but absolutely no code or psuedo-code. A little more googling may turn up another implementation. Genetic algorithms and programs were all over the place 20 years ago.

Yeah, that first claim is pretty narrow. I think PacketVideo is just going for the quick settlement, but is playing a fairly dangerous game. They have to find each and every element of the claim in Spotify's product, that's expensive what with hiring the right experts and all. Especially with those narrow claims. PacketVideo's costs to prove its case could way exceed Spotify's defense costs. In other words, PacketVideo's negotiating leverage doesn't appear too strong right now.

Except for that IPO thing. Maybe that's why PacketVideo thinks Spotify will settle out quickly.

Scanning and storing seems to be adding unneeded effort to your life. The only payoff seems to be that it is now electronic. Otherwise, BFD. Sometimes, upgrading the tech does not equate to upgrading your quality of life.

OK, you scan and store store stuff. Storing it takes about the same effort as filing the original. A year's worth of household/personal records is about 8 inches of file storage for me - and my records are fairly complicated. Those plastic file storage bins hold a foot and a half or so of records. Easy solution. After a few years they make a nice fire.

I like having hard copies around. I like knowing I have a piece of paper that I can hold up and say "You sent this to me ...." or something similar. I also like knowing that the only security risk comes from whoever sent me the bill/invoice/statement/whatever. Most things can be burned after a few years. Actually, most things should be burned after a few years. If the record has no use to you but could possibly be used against you, then why keep it?

Also, as a lawyer, I do dearly love electronic discovery because I can use all sorts of cool search tools to go spelunking through someone's/some company's past. On the other hand, there's no way that I want to make it easy for someone else to do that to me.

I do try to store medical records, legal records, and some account info forever. As in fireproof safe or safety deposit box. Those records benefit -me-. Everything else gets burned. Actually, shredded then burned. Shredded stuff burns so nicely.

I agree with westlake, it looks like Google's attorney's probably messed up. I simply can't see (yet) how this patent stood up to reexamination. More specifically, I can't see how it could have stood up to a competent effort. I'll be pulling the files off PACER (the federal court's document management system) and PAIR (the uspto's document management system) for a little light reading this weekend. By the way, I use the "recap" firefox extension so that everyone snarfing PACER files isn't stuck with the per page fee.

My current theory is that Google used lawyers and off shore search firms to prepare the reexamation and were then stuck when the shoddy result turned out to be insufficient. Another possibility is that the 1997 patent filing predates 99.9% of Google's in house expertise and, as such, they were unable to recall prior art from the 1980s or early 1990s. Such is life when you focus your hiring on fresh faced kids with crinkly new CS degrees.

True-dat. I tried to edit all the past tense references away but failed. Not is the "acorn risc machine" still kicking (and actually doing well), but MIPS got spun back out of SGI.

Perhaps the news is that enough time has passed since RISC that the notion is new again. Except with one sad and sorry exception. The RISC guys are way better engineers because they calculate various effects of their instruction sets and other optimizations BEFORE committing to silicon. The guys in TFA are relative chimps because they're just pruning, testing, and bandaging something they don't seem to fully understand.

An analogy comes to mind: some kids buy a car and pull off pieces until it doesn't work right. Once it breaks, they add duct tape until the car runs again. The stripped down car gets better mileage and can go faster. Somewhere along the way, some journalist looks at the thing and gets excited by the brand new car the kids built. The journalist trumpets to the sky about the wonderful new car and automotive geniuses he's discovered. The kids start a car company, dumb people invest. Meanwhile, automotive engineers furrow their brows, shake their heads, and go back to work.