
With EFF’s help, language teacher responds to threat over ‘invalid’ patent - DiabloD3
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/07/effs-help-language-teacher-responds-ridiculous-patent-threat
======
AdmiralAsshat
> Last week, we visited Congress and presented the ’358 patent to staffers
> there as an example of how important it is to maintain common-sense limits
> on patentable subject matter. The patent lobby—in the form of the
> Intellectual Property Owners Association and the American Intellectual
> Property Law Association—wants Congress to undo Alice through legislation.
> These groups are pushing to change the law so that everything is eligible
> for patent protection unless it is “solely in the human mind.” The ’358
> patent shows what a disaster such legislation would be. It could make the
> patent system a kind of “super copyright” where people can monopolize ideas
> just by putting them on tape.

What did Congress say?

~~~
jessaustin
"Show me the money!"

~~~
craftyguy
Those who did not said "show me a majority of constituents who care."

Representative democracy FTW.

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spraak
Tangentially related, I'd like to share what I have found to be a very
effective and easy language learning tool: find an app of a television network
from a country that speaks the language you're targeting. It's especially
helpful when the app provides subtitles in the language (i.e. for the deaf).
The best example I've come across for this is SVT Barnkanalen if you want to
learn Swedish. There are also good apps for Norwegian and Danish, and for
German there is Kika/Kikaninchen, ZDF and WDR. My child can speak really good
Swedish and German from this technique. As a parent I decided that they would
only consume non-English media, since we live in an English speaking country.
I'm not militant about it, so there are occasionally things in English. I've
heard of some parents saying their children would object to this, so it's
important to start once your child becomes interested in media and you're
ready to let them consume it. Also, it just takes being firm about it and also
knowing that you're not harming them. Finally, I do speak Swedish and German,
but only German somewhat fluently (which is helpful that I can navigate to
help find the resources and correct grammar when I notice it) but my child
already has a bigger vocabulary in Swedish and German than I do, and often
knows more idiomatic ways to express something.

Edit: You'll also want to use a VPN to access the app from the country its
from.

~~~
kodablah
> As a parent I decided that they would only consume non-English media, since
> we live in an English speaking country.

Do you fear the cultural repercussions of this stance just to increase
fluency? For its faults, media and culture are closely aligned and I would be
worried that this is then artificially removing local culture by requiring
only media from other languages.

~~~
spraak
I think we get plenty local culture as I don't believe that media is a
critical component of culture, though I do recognize the benefits and in that
regard I think that in the near future my child will likely ask to watch
things in English. So far they don't feel left out from mainstream kids
movies, because we still watch them (just dubbed but e.g. we watched Moana in
English). Additionally the cultural aspect is a big component that they're
missing from only consuming media and not interacting with the people
directly, so we'll do some traveling to incorporate that into the curriculum.

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kevin_b_er
The "IP" lobby seeks to treat patents as indifferent from physical property.
Casually granted and infringing upon the rights of others, their cause is a
danger to your own free exchange of ideas.

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spraak
I'm checking out some of the Language Transfer courses on my phone and it
reminded me of something so frustrating. I tapped on the Soundcloud link and
it requires the app to be installed. Yelp does this too (you can't read full
reviews without the app). I'm so glad that YouTube hasn't done this, i.e. I
can still view YT videos in my phone broswer.

~~~
phyzome
I just downloaded their MP3 torrent, which worked fine.

The whole have-to-use-our-app thing is ridiculous, especially since there are
so many web APIs that imitate apps.

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mc32
This is the kind of work I like the EFF getting into, rather than when they
stray into the political realm. Stay focused, serve the law (from the public’s
perspective).

~~~
danharaj
D-do you not think patent law is in the political realm?

~~~
slphil
I think what he's trying to express is that patent law shouldn't be bound up
in concerns of party policy. Once something becomes part of the polarization,
it's over.

~~~
bdowling
Patent reform is fundamentally about business interests, which are non-
partisan. Some business want more patent protections, others want fewer. None
of them care whether it is a Democrat or a Republican who makes their desired
reforms.

Groups like the EFF try to make patent law into a civil rights issue. They'll
regularly frame the issues as being about big corporations misusing patents
against "the little guy", often a sympathetic figure like the activist and
language learning site admin here. They try to get ordinary people riled up
about what patent law should be, often by misconstruing facts and simplifying
current patent law, which can be quite nuanced.

Actual patent disputes are always between businesses and always concern
financial interests. There is always one party who doesn't want to pay
licensing fees or wants to do something that the other party doesn't want to
license. The businesses could negotiate a deal where they would all make
money, or the allegedly-infringing party could "invent around" the patent, but
for whatever reason they can't agree on how much money each of them should
make and they decide that a lawsuit is a better course of action.

In any case, some businesses will give money to the EFF and the EFF is happy
to present views that are compatible with those businesses' interests.
Everyone else is just taken for a ride.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
Patents are absolutely not just about business interests. Patents affect
individuals and open source projects just as much as they affect commercial
businesses.

Take for example the Makerbot patent on the Thing-O-Matic, a conveyor belt add
on for 3D printers. Makerbot patented the concept, then discontinued the
product. Hobbyists who designed upgrades to share freely openly expressed
frustration for years about this. Many people wanted the device but community
members regularly expressed in online communities that they feared legal
action if they designed an open source replacement for the defunct patented
product.

Finally recently some hobbyists have found a way to work around the patent by
designing a printer where the print head is not parallel to the build plate (a
key claim of the patent in question). However printing this way has some major
limitations, and the original process would be simpler. The 3D printing
community was held back for 5-10 years in sequential printing technology
because of this patent.

When a free group of people are prohibited from sharing ideas with each other
due to fear from state intervention, it absolutely becomes a civil rights
issue. Is it fair for the government to prevent individuals from freely
exchanging information because a third party has laid claim to that idea? Is
it even a legitimate claim that one entity can own an idea that they formed
through the integration of preexisting ideas? From a practical perspective
does the legal artifice of intellectual property even serve the oft-cited
purpose of improving the general welfare? Should we continue to support this
notion?

These are questions we all should ask ourselves and debate amongst each other.
We invented intellectual property and created laws that enforce it. We must
continue to discuss if such an extreme limit on human behavior is rational or
fair in the modern world. Billions of people are prohibited from accessing
information that could help them thrive. We can now copy information at almost
no cost, but our legal system prevents us from doing so for the bulk of the
world’s knowledge. Is this just? Is it sensible?

~~~
bdowling
Your response reflects some misunderstandings about patent law. It's true that
the law is complicated and there is a lot of misinformation out there. And,
unfortunately the EFF doesn't help that situation when it misconstrues the law
and gets people all riled up. I'll address a couple of your points:

Regarding your 3D printer example, there will always be ways to "invent
around" to accomplish the same result. For example, if the patent claims a 3D
printer with a conveyer belt, that would not prevent someone from building a
3D printer with a turntable to accomplish the same goal. (There is a caveat
here if a turntable is considered an equivalent to a conveyor belt.)

Historically, there has been an experimental use defense for those seeking to
improve upon a patented invention. Theoretically it still exists, but it
wouldn't apply in a commercial context, which would include a hobbyist
distributing small numbers of infringing devices. This exception should be
more clearly defined, but that probably won't happen because _patentees don 't
bring frivolous lawsuits_ against non-commercial experimenters. Again, patent
law is all about business interests.

Another way to avoid infringement is to make either (1) a component which has
substantial non-infringing uses, such that it does not fall under 35 USC
271(c), or (2) an a improved replacement component for the patented device.
Using your 3D printer example, a generic conveyor belt might be a staple
article with substantial non-infringing uses. You would be able to make and
sell those without infringing on the Makerbot patent. You could also sell a
replacement component that only works with the Makerbot printer, because that
would fall under the Patent Exhaustion Doctrine, which says that once a
patented device is sold, the buyer can replace worn-out parts without
infringing.

Patent law does not prevent anyone from sharing information about the
invention or about improvements to it. A problem only arises when people cross
the line to actively inducing the infringement of others, knowing of the
patent and knowing that their actions will induce others to infringe.

Again, these issues are primarily about business interests and competition,
not civil rights. Unfortunately, the EFF does a lot of misconstruing the facts
to get people agitated, and very little to actually educate the community.
Communities of hobbyists who fear lawsuits would be better served by an
organization that taught them how to accomplish their goals without getting
sued, rather than one which just wants to agitate to overthrow the entire
patent system.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
A turntable wouldn’t be sufficient, as one important feature of the belt is
that it ejects parts which are stuck to it when the part is pushed past the
roller.

Perhaps the burden is small in some cases, but it is nonetheless a burden
placed on individuals. You claim the law doesn’t prevent people from sharing
improvements may be true (you sound knowledgeable) but this was lost on the
community members who wanted to design upgrades. I specifically remember
mailing list discussions where individuals believed that sharing infringing
designs was a violation of the law. Which is something it seems you verified
(inducing infringement). I reiterate that this is a legal restriction placed
on free individuals operating outside of commercial interests, and so I
continue to believe this is a civil rights issue. I will also say that
upgrades to the original device are of limited utility because the original
device was small. It also does not help that the largest community for sharing
3D designs is owned by the patent holder.

It seems as though you’ve confirmed that knowingly inducing infringement by
sharing infringing designs would be a violation of the law, so I find it
puzzling that you continue to insist that this primarily affects businesses.
Certainly it affects individuals as well, yes?

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glitcher
What is that word or phrase for when the attempt to stop something ends up
backfiring and instead causes that thing to get a lot of free press and
therefore becomes much more widely used?

I would love to see that happen here. I wasn't familiar with the Language
Transfer project before, but will be trying some of their lessons now.

EDIT: ah, I was trying to remember the "Streisand Effect"

~~~
lukejduncan
Streisand Effect

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect)

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kodablah
> We hope Hodder and Stoughton comes to its senses and abandons its absurd
> demands.

I understand there are limited resources, but if this is the only consequence
that can be hoped for, there is no incentive to abandon anything.

~~~
Freak_NL
The condemning media attention from a respected party like the EFF may harm
their reputation. It also ties up legal resources — they probably target
people that they expect will fold to their demands due to the high cost of
resisting them.

Also, if the EFF is successful, the US patent office might use this as an
example of frivolous patents that should never have been granted in the first
place to resist the legislation mentioned that would make it harder to prevent
such bogus patents in the first place.

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WalterBright
I'm beginning to wonder if copyright and patent protections have ever been of
net benefit to the economy.

~~~
coldseattle
Of course there are instances where copyright and/or patents have helped an
economy.

You don't think that popular books and movies like the "Harry Potter" series
helped the economy? People pay for the licensed content and entire industries
are born that don't hurt anybody, and nobody is coerced to partake in it.

~~~
mjevans
Trademarks as a consumer protection are also fine.

Copyright, for a LIMITED time (say 10 years without registration, and renewed
in 10 year blocks //with// registration and steeply increasing fee) sounds
like it'd be helpful to the economy as well as encourage creators of high
quality content to register.

The exponentially increasing fee would also be a way of keeping actively
stewarded and relevant properties under maintenance.

I also think that, similar to song covers, a maximum compelled fee for
reproduction should also exist (to prevent with-holding content from the
public).

~~~
bdowling
Putting up more barriers to protection would do nothing to protect authors or
encourage their creativity. Most works protected by copyright have no value
and aren't even worth registering. Of those that are registered, most aren't
worth renewing. But if those works weren't protected, non-authors could
exploit high-quality, unrecognized works instead of expending resources to
create something new.

An obvious example might be the brilliant novel that goes ignored by critics.
If it were to easily lose copyright protection, then a producer could adapt it
into a movie and pay the author nothing. But there are thousands of great
novels (and many more terrible ones) for every successful one, so you need to
protect all of them, and do so cheaply, in order to make sure the successful
one is protected.

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seiferteric
Wow, simply using technology for some purpose should never be patentable.

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duxup
It is literally a thing "on a recorded medium"?

How the hell do you approve that, ever?

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innocentfelon
Wow, EFF.

I knew when you turned me down for an amicus brief, my only hope of staying
out of prison, that it was you were too busy doing more important things.

Then I see this.

Invalidating stupid patents is obviously far more important to society than
writing a little note to protect the accused against rampant government
misconduct and technophobia. Who needs a sixth amendment right to
confrontation, anyway?

That’s definitely not what Gilmore, Barlow, and Kapor set out to do, but as I
rot, at least I’ll be secure in the knowledge that patent abuse will not go
unnoticed by the people I trusted in but who were too busy to help me.

~~~
duxup
I guess I'll ask, what is your story?

~~~
300bps
I went to MattChannon.org and spent about ten minutes reading and still had no
idea what he did or what they claimed he did. I did a quick google search on
his name though and found this which explained their side fairly succinctly:
[https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-
courts/ca10/1...](https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-
courts/ca10/16-2254/16-2254-2018-01-31.html)

~~~
jcranmer
For anyone trying to figure out what's actually going on, that does appear to
be the best link.

It basically boils down to: OP committed (alleged) fraud. The government used
a spreadsheet populated from the defrauded's database to come to a figure for
fraud, and submitted the spreadsheet as evidence. OP contends he needs access
to the original database to satisfy as evidence, as a spreadsheet is
potentially modifiable, but apparently doesn't allege that the data was
actually modified.

Or, put another way, OP is insisting that a formatted report of SELECT * FROM
table WHERE user_id=10343; should be inadmissible as evidence in court.

Money quote from the judgement: "Many of Defendants' arguments are better
placed as questions concerning authentication. However, as this was not raised
in the briefs, any argument to this effect was waived."

~~~
innocentfelon
The government did modify the spreadsheet, and we alleged as much multiple
times.

They didn’t even gave us one SQL query like that. All we got was a typo-ridden
excel spreadsheet, with multiple authors, no chain of custody, no queries, and
a random list of accounts that can hop state lines in minutes, and they told
the courts that was how the information came out of the computer.

If that SQL query was what they actually produced, everything would be fine.
We asked them for the queries they used, but they refused.

The quote is what they call “dicta”, or in passing. If you follow the cited
opinions in this brief you will find them all totally inappropriate. They
don’t say what the circuit judge says they say. It’s like the judge just had
his clerk do it and didn’t check the work.

It won’t let me respond as fast as you all are attacking me, so you’ll have to
bear with me.

