Patently mad

Advances in the investigation of the physical universe we live in.
Post Reply
User avatar
YMix
Posts: 4631
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2011 4:53 am
Location: Department of Congruity - Report any outliers here

Patently mad

Post by YMix »

Post 'em when you find 'em.
November 16, 2012, 2:23 pm
Apple Now Owns the Page Turn
By NICK BILTON

If you want to know just how broken the patent system is, just look at patent D670,713, filed by Apple and approved this week by the United States Patent Office.

This design patent, titled, “Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface,” gives Apple the exclusive rights to the page turn in an e-reader application.

Yes, that’s right. Apple now owns the page turn. You know, as when you turn a page with your hand. An “interface” that has been around for hundreds of years in physical form. I swear I’ve seen similar animation in Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons.

(This is where readers are probably checking the URL of this article to make sure it’s The New York Times and not The Onion.)

Apple argued that its patented page turn was unique in that it had a special type of animation other page-turn applications had been unable to create.

The patent comes with three illustrations to explain how the page-turn algorithm works. In Figure 1, the corner of a page can be seen folding over. In Figure 2, the page is turned a little more. I’ll let you guess what Figure 3 shows.

Of course this isn’t the most seemingly obvious patent Apple has been awarded in recent years. The company has also been granted patents for an icon for music (which is a just a musical note), the glass staircase used in the company’s stores – yes, stairs, that people walk up — and for the packaging of its iPhone.

The patent to own the page turn was just one of 38 patents granted to Apple this week. Among the others there was a “Skin tone aware color boost for cameras,” “Location-based categorical information services” and a “Consistent backup of electronic information.”

The page-turn patent was filed in December 2011, but was approved this week. It claims three inventors: Elizabeth Caroline Cranfill, Stephen Lemay and Mikio Inose.

Apple in the past has filed multiple suits against smartphone makers in the United States for infringement of other Apple patents.
“There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent? Take a look at what we’ve done, too.” - Donald J. Trump, President of the USA
The Kushner sh*t is greasy - Stevie B.
User avatar
YMix
Posts: 4631
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2011 4:53 am
Location: Department of Congruity - Report any outliers here

Re: Patently mad

Post by YMix »

Monsanto vs. Vernon Bowman’s Farm
by THOMAS L. KNAPP

In 1860, pro-slavery apologist Edmund Ruffin forcefully argued in support of a proposition: “[T]he greater profits of slaves as property, compared to other investments for industrial operations.”

I’ve no doubt that IG Farben functionaries, touring their shiny new Buna Works complex in 1942 occupied Poland, quelled any twinges of conscience with an identical observation respecting the use of Jewish slave labor from nearby Auschwitz.

Has humanity morally evolved since the US Civil War? Since the Holocaust? If oral argument before the Supreme Court of the United States in Bowman v. Monsanto is any indicator, well, no.

“Without the ability to limit reproduction of soybeans containing this patented trait [resistance to a particular pesticide],” says IG Farb … er, Monsanto … attorney Seth P. Waxman, “Monsanto could not have commercialized its invention, and never would have produced what is, by now, the most popular agricultural technology in America …”

Chief Justice Edmund Ruf … er, John G. Roberts … seemingly agrees: “Why in the world would anybody spend any money to try to improve the seed if as soon as they sold the first one anybody could grow more and have as many of those seeds as they want?”

Like Ruffin and IG Farben, Roberts and Monsanto argue the issue without reference to its moral dimension.

I willingly stipulate to the truth of Monsanto’s claim that its profits would be greatly enhanced were the state to grant it ownership and control of Vernon Bowman’s farm, of Vernon Bowman’s crops, and of Vernon Bowman himself (and for that matter of every farm and farmer on God’s green earth). That’s exactly what Monsanto is asking the state to do, on the basis of precisely that argument.

Keep one thing firmly in focus here: Vernon Bowman had no contractual obligation whatsoever to Monsanto with respect to the seeds he purchased, planted, and saved the progeny of in this case. He’d previously bought other seeds under contracts forbidding such use, and he’d honored those contracts, but these particular seeds were not so encumbered.

If those past contracts cloud the issue for you, keep in mind that this case reprises the Canadian Supreme Court’s 2004 award of “license fees” to Monsanto at the expense of Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser, for reproducing seed bearing “their” patented gene — seed which had come into his possession via natural cross-farm contamination (wind and pollen happen, folks).

Monsanto’s entire case against Vernon Bowman — as with Percy Schmeiser — is that their profits will be negatively affected if they’e not empowered to dictate what Vernon Bowman does on his own land and with his own stuff. The relief they’re requesting is that the state should therefore so empower them.

This is not a case of a “bad” or “over-broad” or “improperly applied” patent. By its very nature, “intellectual property” always represents an assertion on the part of one person of ownership title to the minds, bodies and property of others.

Whether it’s Monsanto’s genetic “patent” claim, or the “copyright” demand of a novelist that once he’s strung some words together in a certain order nobody else may do likewise without coughing up, or Ron Paul’s plea to the United Nations to seize an Internet domain name he wants, “intellectual property” is, simply put, an attempt to turn the world into one big antebellum plantation, with the state as indispensable overseer.

Fortunately, most variants of the fiction of “intellectual property” are quickly falling apart under the pressure of advanced copying and sharing technologies, and the state as we know it is on its last legs too. Neither will be missed.

Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst at the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).
“There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent? Take a look at what we’ve done, too.” - Donald J. Trump, President of the USA
The Kushner sh*t is greasy - Stevie B.
User avatar
YMix
Posts: 4631
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2011 4:53 am
Location: Department of Congruity - Report any outliers here

Re: Patently mad

Post by YMix »

Monsanto Protection Act put GM companies above the federal courts

Monsanto and the US farm biotech industry wield legendary power. A revolving door allows corporate chiefs to switch to top posts in the Food and Drug Administration and other agencies; US embassies around the world push GM technology onto dissenting countries; government subsidies back corporate research; federal regulators do largely as the industry wants; the companies pay millions of dollars a year to lobby politicians; conservative thinktanks combat any political opposition; the courts enforce corporate patents on seeds; and the consumer is denied labels or information.

But even people used to the closeness of the US administration and food giants like Monsanto have been shocked by the latest demonstration of the GM industry's political muscle. Little-noticed in Europe or outside the US, President Barack Obama last week signed off what has become widely known as "the Monsanto Protection Act", technically the Farmer Assurance Provision rider in HR 933: Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act 2013

The key phrases are a mouthful of legal mumbo jumbo but are widely thought to have been added to the bill by the Missouri republican senator Roy Blunt who is Monsanto's chief recipient of political funds. For the record, they read:

"In the event that a determination of nonregulated status made pursuant to section 411 of Plant Protection Act is or has been invalidated or vacated, the secretary of agriculture shall, notwithstanding any other provision of law upon request by a farmer, grower, farm operator, or producer, immediately grant temporary permit(s) or temporary deregulation in part, subject to necessary and appropriate conditions consistent with section 411(a) or 412c of the Plant Protection Act, which interim conditions shall authorise the movement, introduction, continued cultivation, commercialisation and other specifically enumerated activities and requirements, including measures designed to mitigate or minimise potential adverse environmental effects, if any, relevant to the secretary's evaluation of the petition for nonregulated status, while ensuring that growers or other users are able to move, plant, cultivate, introduce into commerce and carry out other authorised activities in a time manner …"

According to an array of food and consumer groups, organic farmers, civil liberty and trade unions and others, this hijacks the constitution, sets a legal precedent and puts Monsanto and other biotech companies above the federal courts. It means, they say, that not even the US government can now stop the sale, planting, harvest or distribution of any GM seed, even if it is linked to illness or environmental problems.

The backlash has been furious. Senator Barbara Mikulski, chair of the powerful Senate appropriations committee which was ultimately responsible for the bill, has apologised. A Food Democracy Now petition has attracted 250,000 names and sections of the liberal press and blogosphere are outraged. "This provision is simply an industry ploy to continue to sell genetically engineered seeds even when a court of law has found they were approved by US department of agriculture illegally," says one petition. "It is unnecessary and an unprecedented attack on US judicial review. Congress should not be meddling with the judicial review process based solely on the special interest of a handful of companies."

Remarkably, though, it has also offended the Conservative right and libertarians. FreedomWorks, the conservative thinktank that helped launch the Tea Party, says corporations should "play by the rules of the free market like everyone else, instead of hiring insider lobbyists to rewrite the rules for them in Washington". Dustin Siggins, a blogger for the Tea Party patriots has called it a "special interest loophole" for friends of Congress. "We are used to subsidies, which give your tax dollars to companies to give them advantages over competitors. We are used to special interest tax loopholes and tax credits, which provide competitive and financial benefits to those with friends in Congress. And we are familiar with regulatory burden increases, which often prevent smaller companies from competing against larger ones because of the cost of compliance. This is a different kind of special interest giveaway altogether. This is a situation in which a company is given the ability to ignore court orders, in what boils down to a deregulation scheme for a particular set of industries," he writes.

Even Monsanto appears a touch embarrassed. The company whose seeds make up 93% of US soybeans, 88% of cotton and 86% of maize and which on Wednesday announced a 22% increase in earnings, has sought to align itself with others in the industry, even though it is far and away the main beneficiary. In a statement, it says: "As a member of the Biotechnology Industry Organisation (BIO), we were pleased to join major grower groups in supporting the Farmer Assurance Provision, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Seed Trade Association, the American Soybean Association, the American Sugarbeet Growers Association, the National Corn Growers Association, the National Cotton Council, and several others."

The company's friends are now on the defensive, seeking to blame "activists". Here is John Entine, director of the Genetic Literacy Project, and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the pro-business, anti-regulation think tank: "The legislation does not, as critics allege, allow farmers or Monsanto to sell seeds proven to be harmful. Rather, it provides legal consistency for farmers and businesses so that they will not be jerked around by temporary findings by competing court systems as activist challenges make their way up the legal food chain."

The only good news, say the opponents, is that because the "Monsanto Protection Act" was part of the much wider spending bill, it will formally expire in September. The bad news however is that the precedent has been set and it is unlikely that the world's largest seed company and the main driver of the divisive GM technology will ever agree to give up its new legal protection. The company, in effect, now rules.
“There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent? Take a look at what we’ve done, too.” - Donald J. Trump, President of the USA
The Kushner sh*t is greasy - Stevie B.
User avatar
Enki
Posts: 5052
Joined: Thu Dec 22, 2011 6:04 pm

Re: Patently mad

Post by Enki »

Thanks YMix. This idea is so mind-bending that I see people defending these sorts of rules, and all I can hear is, "They have every right to enslave me."
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
-Alexander Hamilton
User avatar
YMix
Posts: 4631
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2011 4:53 am
Location: Department of Congruity - Report any outliers here

Re: Patently mad

Post by YMix »

Why DRM in Cars Is Going to Drive Everyone Mad

Forget extra cup holders or power windows: the new Renault Zoe comes with a "feature" that absolutely nobody wants. Instead of selling consumers a complete car that they can use, repair, and upgrade as they see fit, Renault has opted to lock purchasers into a rental contract with a battery manufacturer and enforce that contract with digital rights management (DRM)restrictions that can remotely prevent the battery from charging at all.

We've long joined makers and tinkerers in warning that, as software becomes a part of more and more everyday devices, DRM and the legal restrictions on circumventing it will create hurdles to standard repairs and even operation. In the U.S., a car manufacturer who had wrapped its onboard software in technical restrictions could argue that attempts to get around those are in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)—specifically section 1201, the notorious "anti-circumvention" provisions. These provisions make it illegal for users to circumvent DRM or help others do so, even if the purpose is perfectly legal otherwise. Similar laws exist around the world, and are even written into some international trade agreements—including, according to a recently leaked draft, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

Since the DMCA became law in 1998, Section 1201 has resulted in countless unintended consequences. It has chilled innovation, stifled the speech of legitimate security researchers, and interfered with consumer rights. Section 1201 came under particular fire this year because it may prevent consumers from unlocking their own phones to use with different carriers. After a broadly popular petition raised the issue, the White House acknowledged that the restriction is out of line with common sense.

The problem extends beyond inconvenience. In plenty of cases, DRM has led to users losing altogether the ability to watch, listen to, read, or play media that can't be "authenticated."Video games with online components now routinely reach an end-of-life period where the company providing the authentication decides it's no longer worth it to operate the servers. That raises the frightening possibility of a company like Renault deciding that it's not cost-effective anymore to verify new batteries—and leaving car owners high and dry.

And these are all just the problems with the DRM running as expected. Unfortunately, the intentional restrictions created by DRM can also create security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by other bad actors. The most prominent example may be the "rootkit" that Sony included on music CDs and which led in some cases to further malware infection. The stakes may be even higher when it comes to cars. Security researchers uncovering security problems in cars already face restrictions on publishing; that stands to get worse as DRM enters the picture.

As our friends at iFixit say, if you can't fix it, you don't own it. Users need the right to repair the things they buy, and that is incompatible with blanket restrictions on circumventing DRM.

Copyright maximalists like to point to the 1201 safety valve—a rulemaking procedure to identify narrow exemptions. But the process happens every three years in the Copyright Office, and it's pretty dysfunctional: the exemptions require extensive work, must be justified from scratch each time, and have no established appeal process. Permission to "jailbreak" cars can't even be considered until 2015, and even if it is granted, consumers may be wary to invest in a new car if their right to repair it could be revoked three years later.

There's a better way, but it requires legislation. Representative Zoe Lofgren and a group of bipartisan sponsors have proposed the Unlocking Technology Act, to limit the anti-circumvention provisions to cases where there is actual infringement. That's a common sense change that is long overdue.

More fundamentally, though, users must push back on the creeping imposition of DRM in more and more places. As EFF Fellow and former staff member Cory Doctorow has noted, computers are increasingly devices that we depend on for our own health and safety. It's critically important, then, that consumers actually own our stuff. Stay tuned: We'll be pushing hard on this issue on many fronts in the coming year, and we'll need your help.
“There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent? Take a look at what we’ve done, too.” - Donald J. Trump, President of the USA
The Kushner sh*t is greasy - Stevie B.
User avatar
Doc
Posts: 12561
Joined: Sat Nov 24, 2012 6:10 pm

Re: Patently mad

Post by Doc »

YMix wrote:
Why DRM in Cars Is Going to Drive Everyone Mad

Forget extra cup holders or power windows: the new Renault Zoe comes with a "feature" that absolutely nobody wants. Instead of selling consumers a complete car that they can use, repair, and upgrade as they see fit, Renault has opted to lock purchasers into a rental contract with a battery manufacturer and enforce that contract with digital rights management (DRM)restrictions that can remotely prevent the battery from charging at all.

We've long joined makers and tinkerers in warning that, as software becomes a part of more and more everyday devices, DRM and the legal restrictions on circumventing it will create hurdles to standard repairs and even operation. In the U.S., a car manufacturer who had wrapped its onboard software in technical restrictions could argue that attempts to get around those are in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)—specifically section 1201, the notorious "anti-circumvention" provisions. These provisions make it illegal for users to circumvent DRM or help others do so, even if the purpose is perfectly legal otherwise. Similar laws exist around the world, and are even written into some international trade agreements—including, according to a recently leaked draft, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

Since the DMCA became law in 1998, Section 1201 has resulted in countless unintended consequences. It has chilled innovation, stifled the speech of legitimate security researchers, and interfered with consumer rights. Section 1201 came under particular fire this year because it may prevent consumers from unlocking their own phones to use with different carriers. After a broadly popular petition raised the issue, the White House acknowledged that the restriction is out of line with common sense.

The problem extends beyond inconvenience. In plenty of cases, DRM has led to users losing altogether the ability to watch, listen to, read, or play media that can't be "authenticated."Video games with online components now routinely reach an end-of-life period where the company providing the authentication decides it's no longer worth it to operate the servers. That raises the frightening possibility of a company like Renault deciding that it's not cost-effective anymore to verify new batteries—and leaving car owners high and dry.

And these are all just the problems with the DRM running as expected. Unfortunately, the intentional restrictions created by DRM can also create security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by other bad actors. The most prominent example may be the "rootkit" that Sony included on music CDs and which led in some cases to further malware infection. The stakes may be even higher when it comes to cars. Security researchers uncovering security problems in cars already face restrictions on publishing; that stands to get worse as DRM enters the picture.

As our friends at iFixit say, if you can't fix it, you don't own it. Users need the right to repair the things they buy, and that is incompatible with blanket restrictions on circumventing DRM.

Copyright maximalists like to point to the 1201 safety valve—a rulemaking procedure to identify narrow exemptions. But the process happens every three years in the Copyright Office, and it's pretty dysfunctional: the exemptions require extensive work, must be justified from scratch each time, and have no established appeal process. Permission to "jailbreak" cars can't even be considered until 2015, and even if it is granted, consumers may be wary to invest in a new car if their right to repair it could be revoked three years later.

There's a better way, but it requires legislation. Representative Zoe Lofgren and a group of bipartisan sponsors have proposed the Unlocking Technology Act, to limit the anti-circumvention provisions to cases where there is actual infringement. That's a common sense change that is long overdue.

More fundamentally, though, users must push back on the creeping imposition of DRM in more and more places. As EFF Fellow and former staff member Cory Doctorow has noted, computers are increasingly devices that we depend on for our own health and safety. It's critically important, then, that consumers actually own our stuff. Stay tuned: We'll be pushing hard on this issue on many fronts in the coming year, and we'll need your help.
This has been going on since tape cassettes were put on the market. A small group of record companies lobbied for and I believe got money for every cassette tape produced regardless of what it was to be used for as their "fair" royalty fees since there could be a guaranty that the tapes would not be used to "Illegally" record their labels songs. Yet at teh same time the rights of individuals their personal information of worthless as any large corp including the record labels (and especially the record labels as they have a legal right to hack into individuals computer without a subpena)could collect and use them against consumers in about any way imaginable.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
User avatar
Miss_Faucie_Fishtits
Posts: 2150
Joined: Sat Dec 17, 2011 9:58 pm

Re: Patently mad

Post by Miss_Faucie_Fishtits »

Congress Aims to Rein in Patent Trolls
Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, introduced a bill recently to stop abusive patent litigation. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, Goodlatte noted that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and the White House also agree something needs to be done to prevent abusive patent litigation.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/congress-aims-t ... nt-trolls/
The practice, called “patent trolling,” has grown in recent years, Goodlatte explained. An entity will use a patent not to build or improve an invention, but to threaten businesses with infringement lawsuits to extort a settlement as an alternative to expensive litigation.
She irons her jeans, she's evil.........
Post Reply