Well, that would put an end to pharmaceutical development. Many drugs are not even FDA approved in 5-10 years. Seeing as each costs like a billion to develop that would be the end of that. So yeah, banking on the patent system to get time for cost recovery is just so unreasonable.

The parts of the company that develop and sell goods control the expenditures of the legal department all the time. The legal department does not conduct litigation -- it farms that out. And it has to defend all those dollars spent to the CEO And CFO. Historically, high technology companies have not litigated much. A company has only so many things it can pay attention to. A litigation can divert the attention of top people at the company whose time is probably better spent doing anything else. Entering litigation is not only a dollar cost, there are also opportunity costs. Back when technology companies were essentially expanding into a vacuum taking time off for a law suit would leave both companies behind their respective competitors. Time was too valuable to waste on litigation, so cross-licenses with a transfer of cash became the default model. It may be that the high technology sector has become a mature enough sector that there is not much vacuum to grab. At that point mergers and acquisitions, patent portfolio acquisition become more viable. And a company's competitors may find that it is easier to expand onto the company's territory than go get new intellectual property territory of their own. Intellectual property is part of managing competition. Patents preserve features, copyrights preserve authored works, and trademarks preserve goodwill. For any business that can make money any other way litigation is not a preferred way to make money. And just about any other way than litigation is the preferred route. That is, unless a business likes having to dig up emails and tape backups, have their executives set aside time to download their knowledge to their lawyers and then set aside time to be a witness to boot. The only ones in that boat are failing companies and patent trolls.

Kodak was in the black and white picture printing business since the 1880s. It was in the color printing business by 1835. Hewlett-Packard was not founded until 1939, and it did not start in printers. Brother made its splash in dox-matrix printers in 1971. Kodak could have been far, far ahead of these companies with what we now consider printers. It would have moved in the direction of Xerox and gotten into the printer business. It just did not. It did not ask itself: who is going to cannibalize me, and how do I get in front? Change hit the accelerator pedal, and Kodak was left in the dust.

Please don't confuse FDA with other organizations. FDA is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) generally handles inspections of food. I think fish are actually inspected by the Fish and Wildlife Service which is part of the Department of the Interior. Regarding food, FDA deals with approvals, labeling and definitions. (Definitions such as: evaporated milk: http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_2008/aprqtr/21cfr131.130.htm), not inspections.

We went through this with the butterfly ballots in Florida. People who thought they knew how to design ballots did not actually know how to design ballots. The idea that design only affects how pretty something is is wrong. Apple succeeds in large part because its designs make the products enjoyable to use. There are some people who can handle the entire chain of abilities, but that is not by and large how the economy works. And the bosses have to know this also. Arguably you should cut functionality before design, because without design functionality often becomes inaccessible (that is to say, non-functional). What good is a book if you get a headache reading it?

Actually, office holders did take office in January, but the beginning of the calendar had been March 1 (spring, new beginnings). That is why DECember was the 10th month up until then.

IBM makes something like $1 billion a year from licensing its patents, many of which are software patents. Also, a big pile of patents constitutes a defensive patent portfolio. A potential plaintiff has to ask whether IBM has patents that would hurt more in a counter-suit. IBM is the biggest recipient of patents in the U.S. They probably have something on the order of 50,000 active U.S. patents.

I represent generic drug companies. I can tell you that brand operations do not go after, and would not go after, individual doctors. It would be impractical. Interestingly, the Caraco v. Novo Nordisk case heard on Monday by the Supreme Court was exactly about a situation where Novo Nordisk was going after Caraco not because of anything Caraco did, but because of what doctors and patients would do. So much for that straw man. The Supreme Court is dealing with a line-drawing problem in Mayo v Prometheus. You can't patent gravity but you could have (long in the past) patent a pile driver. The Prometheus patent is about titrating medication levels for a certain class of prior art drugs using prior art tests. Too low, and the medicine is ineffective, too high and it is toxic. Nobody denies that Prometheus was the first to make the investment to come up with the decisional protocol it claimed. There is no doubt that if the claim had added the step "and administering an appropriate dose to a patient" or something like that it would be patent eligible subject matter. This is an important question. Drug companies do expensive research to find new indications to treat with a drug all of the time. Anti-psychotics often will treat other conditions, but who knows which ones? At what doses? If you cannot patent the process of treating the new disease, you cannot get a patent: the molecule is already patented. We are talking high-8 to low-9 figures here to find that out. Let me assure you, nobody will ever know if you cannot patent the result. None of the attorneys offered help to the Supreme Court in how to word the drawing of the line so that it can be applied. The Supreme Court does not take a case to take a case. It takes it to solve a problem in the law. Here, the decision will apply to non-medical as well as medical patents. As another poster pointed out, the problem that Chas complains about has been solved by Congress. It would have been impractical to sue doctors in any event. Companies go after competitors, in this case a competing testing lab. This is just about the Benjamins to both of them.

Well, not being misused is one reason why the Scientologists copyright their materials, and sue anyone who uses the material to criticize the organization. But copyright is subject to fair use. So a parody of his speech, to the extent it is transformative, could be protected and thought to be a misuse of the material. In fact, the more misused it is, the arguably more transformative the misuse is. E.g. "The Wind Done Gone." As always, one needs to consider the commercial impact of the use. While say, "Hamlet" could become "Hamlet the Musical" and be transformative, it also might cut into the draw of Hamlet since they tell the same story.

Considering that TiVO sues just about everything in the set-top box area, that raises its own patent problems.

I have seen mixed things about this, which I attribute to reporters glossing some things over. Some talk about it integrating with the advance army radio system, which Motorola Solutions would obviously do. I also see things about using local cell phone coverage, which would be the Motorola Mobility strength. I find it hard to believe that the U.S. Military would make itself dependent on easily destroyed, easily snooped cellular networks. But hey, it would be cheap, right?

Um, Motorola Solutions is the government radio company, not Motorola Mobility.

Let's be clear here. In Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U.S. 298 (1992), the Supreme Court required a state to have nexus with someone to tax them. In that case, it included Quill paper's business through catalog sales into North Dakota. North Dakota could not exercise taxing authority over Quill because of the dormant commerce clause. But the Court said: "This aspect of our decision is made easier by the fact that the underlying issue is not only one that Congress may be better qualified to resolve, [n.10] but also one that Congress has the ultimate power to resolve." So there. If Congress does something, it is fixed. If not, it is not. Pretty simple, no?

I think that it is pretty clear that your average consumer wants the lighting in his house to make things look nice. Right now, they know if they take an incandescent of a certain wattage and put it into socket A, they are going to get the result they want. That is not the consumer experience of CFLs. Absent the ability to predict how the light will perform in the home, they are not going to want to switch. They will be fine with saving money if they can get the quality they want without becoming a lighting professional. Since Congress' legislation basically does nothing to address consumers' genuine needs, it is stupid. They also need to outlaw sucky lighting options so that everything on the shelf is as good as, or better than, incandescent unless it has big letters saying "this lighting sucks."

Well, if you did something that is open source, it is released into the wild, right? That makes it prior art. So your defense is that their patent is invalid if it happens more than a year later. But under the current house bill (H.R. 1549) which is now in the Senate for approval, users who were making commercial use of the invention more than a year prior to the filing date of the patent, even in secret, are protected. Also, the status of prior public use or publication is stronger under the first-to-file system than the first-to-invent system. Even one day before the patent application's filing date (with the exception of disclosures prior to your publication by the patent applicant) defeats the patent. So things are looking up if you want freedom. Now, if you want to smite greedy companies for using your idea, that is a whole different kettle of fish.