Well, there you are.

Yeah. A few years ago on a EE listserv I saw a patent for a the concept of using guard traces to prevent crosstalk, which is a practice that's been going on since at least the late 90s when I got started.

Here is the episode, it was the software source code they stole, and they had the turbine unit being a near copy:

https://video.search.yahoo.com/search...

16:00 into it.

There is a series on one of the channels about that exact thing, I think it is called "Cyber War". One episode focused on IP, theft, and Chinas huge theft ring it has. A company from the US made a control system for huge wind turbines, and it comes in 2 large cabinets and goes in the control hub of the unit, way up there. They showed theirs, and then showed the chinese knock off, identical down to location of name plates, and sold for 40% less. It had inferior components and yet was marketed as a cheaper alternative, but was a knock off, including the software package to control it. They could not sue, because of the huge costs of an international lawsuit, and even if they won in the US, they couldn't collect because the company was in China. Depressing, but illustrates why having all these nice laws and things is useless with no enforcement.

That was simply a gross estimate of any one of a hundred characteristics you can have with transistors, like FINFETs. Any little configuration change, which may improve one or another performance characteristics, becomes a patent. Patents on patents for patents. It becomes so convoluted, you do not know what the real objective is. The system has been corrupted so companies can choke each other on whos patent it is and demand license fees from each other for what is essentially the same thing.

Yes, I'm aware of many sources of "abandonware" computer games, and I have no problem with them or their customers so long as the product really has been abandoned. (Besides, most of them require significant alteration to be able to run on today's computers.) My rule is, if there is still an authorized source for the product I'm going to buy a legal copy or do without.

Old SF -- there is now an exception in copyright law for bona fide "preservation societies" to make a few copies to preserve. This is also being done with old movies.

(An interesting comparison is the career of August Derleth, HP Lovecraft's executor. Lovecraft's copyrights were for only 28 years, which meant most of them expired in the 1940s-50s, and could not be renewed because of his death. Derleth would change just a few words, making them legally different works, so he could copyright them again, thus keeping them in print.)

I don't like the idea of a mechanism to designate "abandoned" properties precisely because many of them have owners such as Microsoft, who would game the system in order to limit new customers to the new product, with its increased ability to dictate what the buyer may do with his own computer. I don't consider that a legitimate use of intellectual property law.

The modified Windows XP would be a derived work, and if product liability law would hold MS responsible for flaws then that law is broken.

There is the concept of abandoned products. There are old games, etc. that are being distributed by various means for which the original company no longer exists. Presumably someone still owns the copyright in many cases and is simply not deciding to pursue it since the money involved is minor.

I am aware of someone who is tracking down the rights to old science fiction and re-publishing them in electronic form so that they stay available. In some cases this is impossible because the owner can't be found.

Certainly a mechanism could be designed to designate an "abandoned" property. It would be better to have it be used than lost -- probably the original author would think so.

Of course none of that includes Windows XP since Microsoft is clearly still around. The problem with your idea is that if Microsoft accepts money for this they assume some obligation for the product no matter what they put in a disclaimer. It's still clearly their property and includes a whole lot of code that is in Windows 10.

You wouldn't want, for example, someone today to be able to create and market a debugged Windows XP (and pay the standard royalty per copy to MS) as an alternative to today's much-altered Windows 10 which many of us can't stand? Can you explain why allowing that would be a bad idea?

What does it mean to change the "angle" of a bipolar transistor's collector? Do you mean the P/N interface has an angle or the package terminals they break it out into has an angle?

I have seen paptents from a large tech company and it is getting really weird. If you take a trasistor, and change the angle of the part that serves as collector, then they patent it, and sometimes trademark it to boot, then they amass a huge number of patents. I have seen engineers with dozens of patents to their name, and none of them were huge breakthroughs. The definition of patent has warped over the last 40 year as "IP" becomes a commodity. Even copyright and paptent seem to have merged, the STar Trek Axanar thing showed that pretty convincingly when CBS sued for anything related to Trek as used and violating their "copyright", "trademark" or "IP".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE07p...

You goin' to Copyright this...dino?

I agree on software, and the use of copyright. Although I don't think someone should be able to copy your binary code and sell your products after 3-5 years. Write their own code to implement the functions -- sure, have at it!

My area of expertise and interest is in software. For the first few decades there were almost no software patents. Copyright law was used. In the late 80's and 90's patents came into play. In many cases being written for things that had already been in common use -- just not patented so a patent search didn't find them.

The software industry moves fast, you don't need a patent on your ideas to make money, you just need them to not duplicate your code. Going from the idea to the working code is a major effort.

I often say I would be glad for competitors to copy the ideas in my product. That will put them years behind me because those are the ideas I had two or three years ago. And a handful of years is forever in this world.

Plus there is an interesting synergy between the competitors in the computer industry. We all need to have features and capabilities that make us stand out -- but customers have to use our products which means we have to share common approaches to getting things done.

Why bother to create if there's no reward?Without patents the inventor could remain dirt poor, so why bother? So too with copyrights, Inventing may not be the single motivation for making money, but without it, there's not much reason to care.

Patents are NOW a problem. I agree with the concepts. But the implementation, and usage are insane.
IBM gets a LARGE portion of its money from its Patent book. Often times on OBVIOUS solutions.

Patents are supposed to be non-obvious. When Apple got these 2 patents, I died a little:
1) Slide to open (Available on bathroom stalls since I was a kid, and in Castles eons ago)
2) Rounded Corners on the glass (reduces fracturing, and less risk of injury: Available on glass tables for years)

Form and Material changes DO NOT get you a new patent, if the concept does not change.
One company was DENIED a patent whereby carbon and styrofoam are poured first into a mold. Then when
Molten Aluminum is added, their are no air gaps, and the carbon ends up strengthening the Aluminum, and
making it lighter.

The other side quoted the Bible: Add straw to the mud, and cook it. The straw will get cooked away, and the
resulting brick will be stronger and lighter.

The Judge bought it. Patent Denied.

==
The pace of implementation and turnaround has changed. 17 years used to be 1/2 of a lifetime.
Maybe we reduce it to 5-10yrs.
==

The other downside with Patents is that countries like China can literally look them up and use them. Good luck suing them in Chinese courts.

Finally, our government has been known to block some patents and either make them top secret, or make them public.

You can determine for yourself what would happen if you tried to patent making a small nuke based on common materials! I am thinking they wont give you the patent, and they might arrest you for demonstrating it!

The man may know patents, but John Lennen ultimately said he regretted writing "Imagine". He became fond of Reagan, and came to see things differently when he moved to NYC, not quite as spacey as he grew older.
I thought Clinton did all get could to give all patents to China. Some companies stopped registering for patents, and beefed up security, instead of laying their designs where they had to be shared.

Also, software and artificial intelligence are increasingly able to come up with more and more "inventions" of their own, many of which build upon one another. This makes it increasingly difficult to determine the "originality" and "non-obviousness" of a proposed patent.

Is "benefit to society" a proper criteria for determining the worth of patents? Are all re-inventors "fraudulent"? Patents are fundamentally incompatible with individual rights. No one has a "right" to a monopoly, temporary or otherwise, on a process. Processes are not property.

The professor did mention the patent lawyers and Trolls who make considerable more money from the patent process than the inventors do. Then towards the end of the article he talks about China's weak Patent system; hell they steal and use industrial espionage to leap frog ahead of the US. There is really no protection by the US govt. I almost believe that there're trolls in the Patent Office that steal from inventors. Part of the problem that the gov't makes it too time consuming and expensive. My brother came up with a cargo stripping for ocean going oil tankers, I urge him to patent it and he said it was to expensive to patent it because of the cost of an atty and filing fee's.

Recommend that Texas anti-patent professor to move to Venezuela.

Other factors for an inventor are not only the application and other fees, there are patent lawyer fees, and ongoing patent renewal fees to keep the invention protected up to 20 years. Then you need marketing skills and other finances in order to get your product out there. There a tons of companies that will charge you money to simply send copies of your patent to other companies that might be interested in it, usually a total waste in my opinion. Some of those companies might show interest in your idea mostly in order to develop a similar product with enough changes to get their own patent, just pick your brain, and/or just build something that does the same thing with enough different attributes to make it differ enough from your patent, again more attorney fees, usually to no avail. Unless you have a world winning idea that you can afford to follow up on all the processes and legal loopholes, just go ahead and make them or have them made and flood the market as fast as you can. Flooding the market with a stolen idea or a patented device is another scheme with no consequences until they are court ordered to stop, and that is only if you can afford a lawyer bigger and more powerful than theirs. I can attest to all these facts. I've been there, done that. Yes I caved to the trolls, but should have never even tried especially as a simple individual. By having them locally made even at high expense, I was able to sell a few hundred locally at exorbitant prices, and maybe even made a few dollars, but not worth the time and effort. Several who bought them came back for another just to give to a good woodworker friend, or bought themselves another just to have two.

I was told many years ago by a patent attorney that if I apply for a patent, I will have to publish how I am doing it along with drawings, etc. All anyone has to do is modify my concept slightly and they can market my product as their product. His recommendation was to sell as many as I could as fast as I can. I do have Trademarks, which do provide some interesting protection. But even that is vage and not worth much unless you like to pay lawyers.

Fairness is not the issue. It's first past the post, and you lost.

The society that protects inventors with patents loses less from /actual/ re-inventors not doing adequate research before investing their efforts than by allowing /fraudulent/ re-inventors to climb onto someone else's gravy train.

Great TED Talk video about the Fashion industries lack of patents and copyrights.
https://youtu.be/zL2FOrx41N0