Engr David Koni -
Your offer intrigues me. I am very excited to have been selected to receive this offer. It is a great honor as I have always wanted to be an astronaut. It is even better that you are offering me such a great opportunity for free.

However, I am somewhat dubious though, since you state that there are ten spaceline tickets, but only eight left after a Mr. Tim Reed of Gladstone Missouri purchased one such ticket. Perhaps this was just an ambiguity and that you meant Mr. Reed is but one of two sold tickets. So I contacted Mr. Reed in Gladstone, Missouri. He was very surprised to find out that he has a ticket to orbit. He asked me what planet I was orbiting? He must be joking, of course. As such a prominent individual as Mr. Reed must have known that we would be orbiting Earth. Right? Do you offer tickets to orbit other planets?

Also, I am a bit curious about your companies. I could only find a website called "slashdot" ("news for nerds. stuff that matters") that mentioned them. They seemed to scoff at your idea. And, in any case, I assume that this must be a new company because orbital expeditions seem like a new opportunity. So then it would seem reasonable to not yet have a website. So a print out of your website design would make me feel better about your company.

Last question, is it possible to buy a ticket for my cat? I would surely miss my cat if I spent a week in space. Who would feed her? I assume that since it costs merely $25/minute upfront for me that my cat could fly for like $10/minute upfront. Is there are rebate available for her?

With the greatest of respect,
Mr. Reeb MMM

I believe that under a system like described above, most, but not all, works would not be copyrighted after either the first or second renewals. In fact, in an era when a formal registration was required, most works did not get copyrighted.

People and companies don't like paying for things. They also forget.

The same thing happens in the patent world. Lots of the penultimate maintenance fees are not paid on patents because, by that time, most people have decided whether they're going to make money.

So what? There is no legal liability attached to plagiarism; copyright infringement is the only legal issue. Plagiarism is merely a moral, ethical issue that share elements of copyright infringement. And to your example, copyright infringement has a defense of independent creation. Among other things, the author would have to show access to the "infringed" work.

Of all the works in the world, works owned by a "large publisher with a huge sum of cash" is likely the minority of all copyrights.

Besides, the point of the above plan is not to deprive people of their copyrights. It's a plan to balance to trade-offs: continued protection for those that see a continued economic value and release to the public so that others can exploit them.

Copyrights don't protect the ideas of stories. They protect the actual physical work themselves. Ultimately, this comes back around to conflating plagiarism with copyright infringement.

Nevertheless, I'm not about to argue the merits of applying modern copyright law to a different era.

You don't know many artists, do you?

Also, there is a great deal of copyrighted work that gets published once and is essentially abandoned. Look at the software companies whose assets essentially go abandoned, or whose products and solutions have no current use because of hardware and platform changes.

So? I fail to see your point. If it isn't published no one gets the benefit of it anyway and if it is ultimately published then the same rules would apply, no harm no foul. The only questions might be over ownership of the copyright.

So what does temporary mean, "forever less a day?" The constitution already provides for a "limited" time, and the forever less a day is effectively the argument that has won to date.

Really the best strategy regarding copyright duration is something like this:
a) an author receives an initial copyright for a period of 10 years. No formalities required.
b) between years 10-15 (term + 5 year grace period), and author with sufficient interest in maintaining the copyright should have to i) register the copyright, and ii) pay some less than nominal fee. The copyright will continue for an additional 30 years (a total of 40 years).
c) thereafter, the author pays an increasing amount for each additional 30 year period.
d) the copyright automatically expires on the 100th year.

This has lots of benefits: 1. everyone gets a copyright in their works without any formalities. 2. If it is economically viable after 10 years, they can pay a nominal amount and register it (no more orphan works). 3. It will last for most every author's lifetime and then some. 4. It puts works that an author no longer considers valuable into the public domain in relatively short order.

I am a lawyer, and this is common advice. Typically willful infringement is not the issue, but it could be. In order to prove willful infringement, "a patentee must show by clear and convincing evidence that the infringer acted despite an objectively high likelihood that its actions constituted infringement of a valid patent." (In re Seagate Tech., LLC., 497 F.3d 1360 (Fed. Cir. 2007)). In other words, was the accused infringer acting recklessly when they made, used or sold a product. Simply finding a prior art patent that may cover your invention may not rise to that level. Moreover, if you know about it, then there's a chance you can avoid infringement altogether.

But, the more common rationale is that it might later raise inequitable conduct questions if you perform the search and FAIL to disclose the results of your search to the patent office during prosecution of the patent application. In that case, you find good art and you fail to disclose it to the patent office with intent to deceive the office. Naughty naughty.

There are benefits to do a search. First, a good, well-documented search can be very useful in avoiding unnecessary patent prosecution. There is no need to go in ignorant of what's out there and incur needless additional prosecution costs. Second, if you actually submit the art during prosecution, it will be on the face of the patent when it issues and the burden increases in order to use that art to invalidate the patent. This is often overlooked.

But with that said, anyone contemplating infringement or patent prosecution should, first, shut up and not talk to anyone and, second, hire a lawyer.

That is all.

Design patent law is an area of great frustration for people. Design patents are relatively easy to obtain because of what they cover: essentially the identical design or any colorable imitation. As recently stated by the Fed. Cir., the test for design patent infringement is stated: "infringement will not be found unless the accused article âoeembod[ies] the patented design or any colorable imitation thereof.â" Egyptian Goddess, Inc. v. Swisa, Inc. Therefore, to invalidate, the design must either embody the prior art or merely be a colorable imitation. This is a tricky analysis.

For companies like Apple and Google, design patents are helpful in preventing knock-offs. In this respect, the line is blurred between trademark and design patent law. However, they are not useful for much else since many of the elements of a design are functional (and a good lawyer can make that argument) and are not merely composed of distinctive elements.

And, all is not lost for similar "prior art" designs, though. The very same case made the point that "prior art" designs might also be used by a defendant to highlight the differences between the claimed and accused design. Thus, an accused defendant might escape infringement by pointing out those elements they share with the prior art design and thus those elements cannot be the grounds for infringement.

A final point, design patents are what a lot of people were duped into filing when going to Invention Help companies. Those companies simply filed a mostly worthless design patent instead of a utility patent. They have practically no commercial value except as a deterrent to would-be second-comers trying to copy verbatim the design. Therefore, those that were duped have virtually no protection against second comers that merely make changes the look & feel of an "invention." Plus, the inventors are then locked out of filing a utility application because they usually don't realize until much too late (more than a year after they start selling, for instance). That sucks.

I'm a lawyer, and I'll be the first to admit that many of my colleagues do little to help themselves when it comes to being end user friendly. The blocks of all caps being a sure symptom of that. A site about contract drafting style actually had a pretty good discussion regarding the conspicuousness requirements and the use of all caps: http://www.adamsdrafting.com/2008/02/04/all-capitals/

In my opinion, the all caps paragraphs are merely remnants from a time when contracts were drafted without the assistance of word processors capable of doing bold face type. And, frankly, that wasn't that long ago. Many lawyers that I know continue to cut and paste the boilerplate language or modify the boilerplate language keeping in tact whatever drafting convention was used originally.

That said, there is also some advantage to using all caps over bold face for when it comes to OCR, text translation, format-less archiving, etc. In that case, the "conspicuousness" is maintained (i.e., all caps), even if the formatting is dropped. It's a very weak advantage.

Good point. Innovative is not the right term. I should have said: new, useful and non-obvious.

Litigation is a very good vehicle for testing the patentability of an invention. Or, at least, it is considerably better than patent prosecution. In the case of litigation, the defendant has significant incentive to search out and put forth the best evidence of obviousness and anticipation.

I often doubt whether judges and juries are very good at analyzing the evidence, but lawyers are left to explain it.

That is not a definition of a patent troll. That is the argument of someone that does not like method/software/process/chemical/biotech patents.

Besides, you're not even right about this point. The very first patent listed includes apparatus claims, U.S. Patent 6,233,389 claim 32. I don't know whether they're asserting that particular claim, but it's there.

You do not understand the idea of a patent then. Patents do cover ideas, they do not cover specific embodiments.

What you are suggesting would effectively be copyrights for machines: tall (long period of time) and thin protection (only a specific hardware). This would make patents effectively meaningless, which might be your real point anyway. Infringement would be easily avoided if you only had protection for one possible way when, once the idea is out, people could create lots of minor variations.

And, in any case, it's not clear that what you're proposing is really that different than what occurs now. Apparatus (and method claims alike) are directed to the fewest number of elements necessary to perform the invention that can overcome the prior art during prosecution. So, to the extent that you can implement the same system using different non-equivalent elements or do it with fewer elements, you will not infringe.

Everything in one sense or another combines preexisting technologies. While a combination of things can make an invention obvious (Sec. 35 USC 103), the mere fact that they exist does not make the combination not patentable. You'd be hard pressed to point to ANY invention that is not the combination of known things.

So this should be tagged "!troll" "badsummary" and "bitterposter" because I'm not entirely sure that this summary does it any justice. First, TiVo is not a troll for at least the reason that they actual manufacture products embodying the patent, have done so for a long time, and actually have revenue related to both hardware and subscription fees. [citation needed ;)].

Second, together with ReplayTV (now Motorola?), TiVo really was an innovator in this space. Whether these particular patents were innovative was at least decided with respect to DishNetwork. AT&T and Verizon will now get their chance to try to invalidate it. Who knows, maybe they have some damn good art.

This comes up every time warranty issues are raised. The problem is that for that warranty to be effective, the parties had to agree. Hence, those that say open source software is not an agreement (or that one does not have to accept the terms of the GPL etc.) have a problem. I've said it before, certain of the terms of the GPL are not merely license language. The community cannot have it both ways.

Either this clause in unenforceable because their is no agreement (one party did not agree to it), or the GPL requires every user to accept the terms of it.

Well, just looking at claim 1, there is no Bilski problem. It's a system claim; not a method. A system claim will likely survive any review under Bilski since it's going to be tied to a particular machine. In particular, an administrator interface and a database would be sufficient not to mention the fact that it has to be capable of receiving user input. Good try though.