Wednesday, May 23, 2007

If the Patent Reform Act Passes

Legislation changing the current system, by granting patents to the "first-to-file" vs. the "first-to-invent," has a good chance of passing

Last month, a bipartisan group of leaders from the Senate and the House introduced identical patent-reform legislation that experts believe has a good chance of passing. The Patent Reform Act of 2007 is similar to legislation that has been tried in years past but never succeeded, says J. Warren Lytle, an intellectual property lawyer at Sughrue Mion, in Washington, D.C. Lytle spoke recently with Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein about the proposed changes to intellectual property law and how they might affect small-business owners (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/14/07, "A Higher Hurdle for Inventors"). Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:

This legislation, introduced by senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and Representatives Howard Berman (D-Calif.) and Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), is similar to legislative reform introduced last year and even before that. What chance does this version have of becoming law?

This year, all the stars seem to be aligned. It looks very favorable that some reform will go through in this Congress before the fall, when the concentration is going to shift to the 2008 elections.

What does the bipartisan bill do?

It updates current patent laws and provides reform for patent seekers and patent holders. Among many important reforms, the bill would create a pure "first-to-file" system. The U.S. system is the only one in the world that still grants patents to the first inventor, rather than to the first person to file a patent application. The bill also creates a more streamlined and effective way of challenging the validity and enforceability of patents.

When we're talking about the "first-to-file" right, what does that mean?

The U.S. has been unique among all other countries because we have this "first-to-invent" system, rather than a "first-to-file" system. What that means is that diligent inventors get the patent if they can prove they had the idea first and they began using it commercially, even if they aren't the first to file for a patent.

Smaller companies might not have the resources in place to generate patent applications quickly, as large corporations can do. So in the past, the entrepreneurs have been happy with the "first-to-invent" system because they get the rights if they can show that they've invented it and they've been selling the product.

So if the legislation passes, will this be a bad thing for small companies and inventors?

It'll certainly make it even more important for them to file for a patent for their inventions and new products right away.

What are the reforms proposed on the back end of the process, in terms of challenging a patent's validity?

The legislation establishes something like a "post-grant opposition system." This means that after a patent has been granted, there will be a short period of time in which someone can challenge it. So if a patent issues, and somebody in your company has been watching for it, they can initiate an opposition action within the patent office to oppose the patent and there will be a mini-trial held in front of the patent administration office to determine the validity of the patent.

Other countries, like those in Europe, have this kind of system but if this legislation passes, it will be a first for the U.S. That means an entrepreneur wouldn't have to go to federal court to invalidate a patent, which is very costly, with long delays and a jury.

What are the implications of this for the small-business owner?

Well, a small company that monitors the patents coming out in their area of expertise might be able to take advantage of this opposition system immediately instead of waiting to get sued. If a patent issues that looks close to what you're doing, or that might give you problems, you could initiate an opposition to it.

The downside is that if you petition for opposition, and your petition is denied, you can't later seek to raise the same issue in a federal civil lawsuit. You can still file the suit later, however, if you've not taken advantage of the opposition system.

What's the motivation for this reform?

The goal has been to reduce the number of patents that should not be granted every year and to reduce the amount of expensive patent litigation that gets brought into the courts. There has been a lot of litigation resulting from people who get patents on inventions that are "obvious"—or not novel.

What happens is that they get these patents and then they assert them against businesses that are generating money. We call these people "patent trolls"—they get a patent, they don't make that product, but they legally go after companies that are producing that product. The word troll arises from the idea that there's a "patent thicket" out there that innovative companies have to navigate in order to get a product out. And, at the worst time, a troll emerges from the thicket with a lawsuit.

How costly is it to get a patent these days?

If you've got a mechanical invention, it'll cost between $5,000 to $10,000 including attorney's fees and filing fees. If you're talking about electronics, the cost goes up to more like $8,000 to $15,000. In the biotechnology industry, the cost is even higher.

Karen E. Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.

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Google to license Stanford's Stanley tech, enhance maps

Although Google Maps might have been called out by name as the best in "Lazy Sunday" (double true), Microsoft's been gaining ground of late by adding lots of trick features to its own mapping site, particularly some nifty simulated 3D views. Well, Google is never one to lie back and take it from the Redmond crew, so it's struck a deal with Stanford to license the sensing technology behind 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge winner Stanley to improve their maps. Stanley, as you probably remember, was a robotic Volkswagen Touareg put together by the Stanford Racing Team that zipped across the Mojave Desert for 10 hours without any human input, winning the Grand Challenge by a hair. Now that same tech will reportedly be used to scan building faces and improve the 3D portions of Google Maps and Google Earth. Details of the deal and how it will be implemented are due to be announced during the Where 2.0 conference on May 29 and 30 -- here's hoping it involves the phrase "army of robotic Google cars."
[Via I4U News]

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Better Clouds, Wind Coming to Second Life

secondlife1.jpg Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, has announced the acquisition of graphics technology from Windward Mark Interactive . Linden Lab will acquire WindLight, an advanced atmospheric rendering technology; Nimble, a realistic 3D cloud simulator; and associated intellectual property and interests.

Once the acquisition is complete, Linden Lab plans to open source the technology and integrate it into Second Life, bringing a new level of realism to the Second Life metaverse.

WindLight uses algorithms that imitate the ways in which light is affected by real-world atmospheric factors like dust and moisture, enabling the nuances of sunlight, clouds, water and weather to be accurately simulated in real-time. Nimble uses advanced physics models to realistically simulate clouds.

Alliance, an online game developed by Windward Mark Interactive does not form part of the acquisition.
slclouds.jpg
original image credit Tim Bray

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Western Digital's 250GB perpendicular Scorpio heads for laptops

Late last year, Western Digital decided to make the leap to the land of perpendicular magnetic recording with its 160GB Scorpio, and now the firm is stepping it up to a full quarter terabyte with its latest rendition. The 2.5-inch SATA drive fits nicely within the confines of most lappies, sports 8MB of cache, a 12-millisecond access time, spins at 5400RPM, and touts the company's WhisperDrive technology so you'll barely know its there. Additionally, the ShockGuard and SecurePark systems tag team to keep your data safe during turmoil, and the IntelliSeek system reportedly "calculates the optimum seek speed of the read / write head actuator to help reduce noise and power consumption." So if you're looking to up the storage capacity of your mobile machine, you can snag WD's latest right now for a penny under $200.

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DViCO's TViX M-5100SH offers 1080p, HDMI, and H.264 decoding

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Seems like only yesterday -- ok, 4 days ago -- we were telling you about the DViCO M-4000SA HD media player. Now they're back with the M-5100SH which bests the former with 1080p support, HDMI output, and H.264 decoding. It still packs Ethernet for plenty of in-home media streaming and of course DViCO will be more than happy to throw in a 3.5-inch, 512GB SATA disk for a fee. But why not save some bills-per-byte and double your capacity with a 1TB Hitachi disk purchased elsewhere. You can also add WiFi and an optional ATSC tuner to create a full-featured 1080i video recorder. Decent but standard stuff so far; what's odd is the pricing. The cylindrical M-5100SH is only available for pre-order and will cost $439 when it ships next month in Japan and presumably parts beyond. Meanwhile, the boxy M-4100SH offers all the same features as the M-5100SH yet costs only $359. Oh, and it's available domestically now. Of course, black MacBook owners already know the premium paid for aesthetics. Peep the M-4100SH slab after the break. [Via Impress] Read -- M-5100SH Read -- M-4100SH

Continue reading DViCO's TViX M-5100SH offers 1080p, HDMI, and H.264 decoding

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Plinkme.com - Free Exposure, Free Photos for Your Site

Bloggers like to spruce up their blog with pictures-- after all who really reads posts longer than two paragraphs in these Twitter influenced days? You can take your own photos with your handy camphone, or digital Leica , however, sometimes your photos don't make the cut, and you need something else. Now Plinkme has come up with a service to hook up bloggers with photos, while giving photographers plenty of exposure. You can browse through the site's growing gallery of photographs and pick something that suits your fancy; to use it in your blog just copy a snippet of code, et voila you've got a nice photo to enliven your post. All photos from Plinkme will include links back to the original source; one link goes directly to the photographer's Plinkme gallery, the other will go to his/her personal website. All photos are displayed via Flash, meaning photographers needn't worry about proper credits. So you photogs out there can get some exposure just by uploading your photos. Plinkme also encourages comments so you can get feedback on all your work. It's a great way to share content. In their own words: "Plinkme was developed to provide bloggers, article writers and content republishers with a means to easily and very quickly add a photo to their content to make it more visually appealing - simply by copying and pasting some JavaScript into their page. Plinkme is also a service for photographers to showcase their work, get them exposure and generate links to their site. We believe this service will give serious amateurs and professional photographers a means to get their pictures into the public eye; Plinkme automatically provides a link back to the photographer's own home page as well as their plinkme gallery whenever and wherever the photo is published." Why it might be a killer: Plinkme is a perfect marriage between publishers and photographers; bloggers get readily available photos, that are quite good, without having to go through the hassle of uploading etc; photographers meanwhile, get their work displayed all over the web, and they receive proper credits too. Plus the site is beautifully designed with tags and categories. Some questions: Will photographers be wary about submitting their work for others to use? Plinkme doesn't work with MySpace, Hi5, and a host of other networks because they use javascript, despite displaying as Flash- so what good is it really if you can't use it with your social networks?

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Total HTML Converter can convert HTML webpages into virtually every file format including JPG pictures, Word Documents, Adobe PDFs or even Excel Spreadsheets. You can also use this tool to extract plain text from HTML web pages. The utility supports batch conversion allowing your to transform any number of HTML files into other formats at the click of a button. Geeks would love the command line support. convert html to pictures Total HTML Converter supports different charsets and encoding tables and can fit HTML Width to the chosen PDF-Page-Size. Total HTML converter costs around ~$40 but you can have this useful HTML conversion tool for free providing you start your downloading engines within the next 24 hours. Download Total HTML Converter at Give Away of the Day for free. No watermarks.

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MIT's handheld FAR-NDT device sees cracks in structures

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We've already seen radars come in handy when dodging impending attacks and avoiding accidents, but researchers at MIT are utilizing the technology to make sure our roadways and structures aren't pushed beyond their limits. A newfangled handheld device uses FAR-NDT (far-field airborne radar nondestructive testing) in order to "see through the fiberglass-polymer wrapping often used to strengthen aging concrete columns to detect damage behind the wrapping not visible to the naked eye." Furthermore, the technique can be executed from about 30 feet away and "requires no dismantling or obstruction of the infrastructure" in order to provide instant feedback. Unsurprisingly, creators are suggesting that it will be best used on bridges and piers which are typically difficult to carefully inspect, and while there's no word on when this stuff will hit DOT offices nationwide, current prototypes are panning out quite well. [Via Physorg]

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Intel's P35 "Bearlake" chipset gets benchmarked, reviewed

Those of you that have been itching to see just how well the first batch of Intel P35 "Bearlake" motherboards perform can now rest a bit easier, as the first reviews and benchmarks are finally starting to trickle in. From the looks of it, HotHardware is among the first to do the honors, getting their hands on Asus's new P5K3 Deluxe motherboard and some Corsair XMS3 DDR3 memory to go along with it. According to their findings, that combination delivered 2 to 5% boost in performance over its 965 counterpart across a range of applications, with the mobo also delivering some modest gains when loaded up with DDR2 memory. While that may seem like a relatively small bump in performance, HotHardware sees plenty more room for the chipset to grow, most notably with the addition of 1733MHz DDR3 memory. About the only downsides they could find are the DDR3 RAM's somewhat high latency and the high cost of the hardware for early adopters, although that's hardly a surprise. Those still craving some more details can hit up the link below for the complete rundown.

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Dell XPS 720 H2C gets official

We already knew it was coming and knew what it'd look like, but we've now got the official word from Dell on its new high-end XPS 720 H2C Edition, which is sure to delight those with big pocketbooks and a penchant for slanted boxes. Boasting a starting price in the neighborhood of $6,000, this mammoth rig comes equipped with your choice of factory overclocked QX6700 or QX6800 Core 2 Extreme processors, dual GeForce 8800 GTX or GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics cards, a pair of 160GB SATA hard drives, some overclocked Corsair Dominator DDR2 memory, a Blu-ray drive, and, of course, Dell's trademark H2C thermo-electric/liquid cooling system. As of yet, there's no word on a non-H2C model. Those in the U.S. can get their orders in now, while those in Europe will have to wait a few more weeks.

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Medical records of Colorado residents compromised

Jon Gordon from Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) says,
On MPR's wavLength blog and American Public Media's Future Tense program, there's a story about how we came across personally identifiable medical records for thousands of residents of Colorado (and some from Illinois) on an FTP server that required no username/password to view the data. Data was sensitive, and some records included SSNs.

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Monday, May 21, 2007

Why English is Hard

Big difference between "attendee" and "attendant" -- one attends, the other attends to. :-)

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Brother's RL-700S prints out RFID cards

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It's just too fitting that a company dubbed Brother would unleash a printer that enables even the little guy to become a Big Brother, but the RL-700S printer can indeed pop out IC tag labels with embedded RFID by the dozen. Presumably marketed towards businesses who need to keep better track of personnel, this machine also sports an RFID reader to keep a digital eye on those passing by, and even laminates the cards so that your dutiful subordinates will never suspect that their hard-earned "Employee of the Month" card is actually an undercover tracking device. Additionally, users can even pick up an optional PS-9000 module that enables network printing, and while we're not savvy on the price, it looks like it'll only be available in the oft surveyed nation of Japan anyway.

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Dell's ultra-thin LCD concept with DisplayPort going retail?

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Remember that super swanky Dell monitor concept we went ga ga over back at January's CES? Yeah, we still find it hard to believe it's a Dell design. Well, it'll apparently be up for sale later in the year. What's more, it features the new VESA approved DisplayPort 1.1 interface which allows Dell to keep the panel depth to a crazy thin 0.5-inches. Although DisplayPort is said to support a resolution 4x that of today's HDTV resolutions, the panel on this pup was only pumping an estimated 1920 x 1200 when we saw it. No specs or price but we expect good things given Dell's past performance in delivering top-notch displays on the cheap.

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