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It's election season in the UK, and the Green Party's policy document has been coming under scrutiny recently. In it is a desire to reduce copyright term to 14 years (not life + 14 years, but 14 years from publication).
Unsurprisingly, this has received a bit of a backlash from various parties.
There's no chance the Green Party will form the next government, so this is all academic, but is this a sensible idea? Are people overreacting?
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UK Green Party Proposes 14-year Copyright Term - Artists are not Amused
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Everything you know is wrong!
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Friday April 24 2015, @06:02PM
A nit to pick.....
Patents can be granted on ideas alone though.
I don't think you can patent an idea.
According to the USPTO:
What can be patented - utility patents are provided for a new, nonobvious and useful:
Process
Machine
Article of manufacture
Composition of matter
Improvement of any of the above
Note: In addition to utility patents, encompassing one of the categories above, patent protection is available for (1) ornamental design of an article of manufacture or (2) asexually reproduced plant varieties by design and plant patents.
What cannot be patented:
Laws of nature
Physical phenomena
Abstract ideas
Literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works (these can be Copyright protected). Go to the Copyright Office .
Inventions which are:
Not useful (such as perpetual motion machines); or
Offensive to public morality
Invention must also be:
Novel
Nonobvious
Adequately described or enabled (for one of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention)
Claimed by the inventor in clear and definite terms
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday April 24 2015, @06:13PM
That simply says that it must be a specific type of idea. You can't patent just any random idea, but the patent is still granted on the idea alone, not the implementation.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Friday April 24 2015, @06:47PM
the patent is still granted on the idea alone, not the implementation.
NO. Not in the U.S.
Invention must also be:
Novel
Nonobvious
Adequately described or enabled (for one of ordinary skill in the art) to make and use the invention
Its not adequate to simply write down your idea, You can't say: I patent the idea of self mating socks, and hope they come about somehow so you can patent troll the manufacturer. You need to define an implementation, method of manufacture, in sufficient detail such that any sock manufacturer could produce them.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday April 24 2015, @07:16PM
Right. You need to *define* the implementation and method of manufacture. You don't need to actually implement it. You need *the idea* of how to do it. Again, you patent a specific type of idea, not a physical good. And note that nowhere does it say the idea has to actually be feasible. Project Orion (nuclear bomb powered spaceship) could certainly be patented, you could easily describe it in sufficient detail, but there's no way in hell it would be practical for anyone to actually build the thing with our current technology.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday April 24 2015, @09:44PM
And note that nowhere does it say the idea has to actually be feasible.
Again, that is incorrect.
What cannot be patented:
Inventions which are:
Not useful (such as perpetual motion machines);
This following information was taken from the USPTO website
http://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/general-information-concerning-patents#heading-4 [uspto.gov]
The patent law specifies that the subject matter must be “useful.” The term “useful” in this connection refers to the condition that the subject matter has a useful purpose and also includes operativeness, that is, a machine which will not operate to perform the intended purpose would not be called useful, and therefore would not be granted a patent.
...
A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc., as has been said, and not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine. A complete description of the actual machine or other subject matter for which a patent is sought is required.
See also http://www.uspto.gov/help/patent-help [uspto.gov] (Its a huge page, search for "How do I know if my invention is patentable?"
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday April 25 2015, @02:24AM
Wouldn't a perpetual motion machine be quite useful? Because it would basically be producing free energy.
The problem is that it isn't *possible* as far as we know.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Saturday April 25 2015, @04:42AM
Those rules don't say it needs to be feasible, they say it needs to be physically possible. Again, look at something like Project Orion. You could patent that. If you built it, it would function as intended, and it would serve a useful purpose. The fact that nobody would ever fianance it, the fact that it might cause massive environmental destruction, even the fact that we might have nothing capable of lifting it high enough to launch...all of that is irrelevant. You can still patent it. And maybe someday we'll solve those problems and it'll be useful. Or you can patent lab grown hamburger meat that costs a million dollars per gram too, even though it may be decades before it's cheap enough to sell to McDonald's.
And yeah, I'm not saying patenting a *suggestion* is possible, I'm just saying you don't need to build a prototype. You need some CAD drawings maybe. So yes, it can cost the entire global GDP to build the damn thing, you can still patent it, because the cost is irrelevant and you don't have to actually build it. It can require a million dollars of resources to produce one dollar of product, that's also irrelevent.
So, suppose you patent something that would work, but is too expensive or too slow because it requires an absurd amount of processing power. Processing power gets cheaper and faster every year. The patent is worthless today; and it's worthless forever if it expires before processing power gets cheap enough to make it profitable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @09:19PM
Until 1880, the Patent Office required you to submit a model of your device. [wikipedia.org]
You still have to submit a drawing of your gadget.
There's even a preferred technique [tqn.com] as well as people who specialize in that.
Isn't it interesting that you DON'T have to submit source code for your idea to get a patent on software?
How exactly does that "promote the progress of science and useful arts"?
...and it has taken -way- too long to get to Alice. [wikipedia.org]
-- gewg_