IP Intellectual Property
and IP Intellectual Property Rights, Copyleft - Fair Use Rights
How to rescue a patent that expired for failure to pay maintenance fees.
There is a requirement to pay maintenance fees in order to keep your patent alive. Maintenance fees must be paid at 3.5 years, 7.5 years and 11.5 years after the patent has issued.
What happens if you have not paid them and want to get them back after they expired. There is a provision to “revive” a patent that has gone abandoned for failure to pay a maintenance fee. This can be found in chapter 2590 of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedures.
There are two ways to revive a patent that has gone abandoned for failure to pay maintenance fees. Both involve filing a petition. The cheaper of the two petitions is a petition to revive an abandoned patent that has unavoidably gone abandoned, and the second is a petition to revive an abandoned patent that has unintentionally gone abandoned. It is almost impossible to get the patent office to agree that the failure was unavoidable, you'd have to prove that the payment was sent, from china and the postal service lost it on the way, or some other measure that is completely out of your control...
You have to
check the box on the form that reads, "the failure to pay the fee was unintentional." If you file such a petition, along with the petition fee, and the maintenance fee, the patent will be revived.
DISPOSSESSION AND PROPERTY IN EMPIRE
The shift from granting monopolies to the aristocracy through nepotism or preference to granting monopolies to individuals on the basis of originality and contribution to industry laid the groundwork for the contemporary global intellectual property regime.
US Begins Process Of Forcing Extreme IP Enforcement Across Africa
2/14/12
We've noted a few times recently that over the last few years WIPO has at least appeared to be more receptive to views from developing nations that strict copyright and patent enforcement could do a lot more damage than good. There are actually tons of compelling economic evidence that developing countries are best off mostly ignoring IP laws as they grow. Hell, the US is example number one of a country that completely ignored foreign IP laws while it developed, much to its advantage. Of course, the US, which leads the developed countries these days, absolutely hates this concept and has taken a strong maximalist position that all countries must respect US IP laws (or go even further). A big part of the reason that ACTA was negotiated outside of WIPO was because WIPO was actually listening to countries like Brazil and India that were expressing concerns about over-enforcement and the harms it created.
However, WIPO itself has expressed concerns about this... but rather than working to convince the US that its approach is incorrect, it looks like WIPO may be going back in the other direction of supporting pure maximalism (i.e., the US agenda). Witness the ridiculous situation shaping up in Africa, where "WIPO" isorganizing a "training" program about intellectual property that appears to have been entirely created by the US. It's scheduled to take place in South Africa in April, but it's strictly focused on enforcement and concepts that the US supports, rather than more reasoned issues about what countries in Africa actually need:
"It’s as if the last five years didn’t happen – no WIPO Development Agenda, no discussion on copyright limitations and exceptions, no proposals in favour of libraries and archives, education, blind and visually impaired people,” said Teresa Hackett, Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL). “But they did happen, and we will work to ensure that delegates attending the African IP Forum hear a diversity of opinion and perspective, and have the opportunity to debate these issues that are critically important to libraries in Africa and around the world." [snip]
N.C. Professor is allowed to sell his class lectures online
The 60/40 split a NC professor of communication, had been selling lectures from his classes to students and others through a Web site called Independent Music Online. The lectures, in MP3 format, sold for $2.50 each, with $1.00 going to Mr. Schrag and $1.50 going to the music Web site. Professors at NC own their IP content. Engineering and science professors often receive compensation for the intellectual material they produce, so why shouldn't humanities and social sciences professors be paid as well? his lectures are meant for three audiences: students who are motivated
to do well in the course and want access to supplemental material,
international students who may have difficulty understanding English,
and students who would prefer to skip class.
3/06 "A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a writer who claimed [Google] infringed on his copyright by archiving a Usenet posting of his and providing excerpts from his Web site in search results."
The key ruling: "When an ISP automatically and temporarily stores data without human intervention so that the system can operate and transmit data to its users, the necessary element of volition (willful intent to infringe) is missing," the court said.
Intellectual Property and the New Class Divisions The Chronicle 5.1.28
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i21/21a01402.htm
The concept of intellectual property has created a class division between "hackers" -- producers of information, be they academics, creative artists, or others -- and a suffocating "new ruling class" that has seized ownership of this property via patents, copyrights, and trademarks. So argues McKenzie Wark, a professor of media and cultural studies at New School University, in A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press).
Q. What's new about what this so-called ruling class is doing?
A. Until the late 60s, one thought of copyright or patent as a kind of limited device, in the context of thinking of knowledge as something that should be shared. Intellectual property turns it into the
equivalent of a private-property right. That's equivalent to the enclosure of the commons, in my view.
Q. But why should information differ from any other good?
A. Information has really peculiar qualities. My possession of some piece of it does not deprive you of it. So the usual laws of scarcity don't apply. With the rise of digital technology, for the first time
we have something that can, at least in part, really escape from scarcity.
Economic logic usually starts by saying desires are infinite but means are scarce, therefore we need resource allocation. Here we have a nonrivalrous good. We have something that challenges the whole notion of scarcity. That presents a utopian possibility that one should
explore to the limit. But what one finds is that we are increasingly shoving information back into the logic of the old economy of scarce things by legal and technical means.
Q. And the new intellectual-property regime prevents "hackers" from building on or toying with products that in essence are cultural artifacts?
A. Exactly. We have the beginnings of whole new kinds of what I would call abstract-gift economy. That would include the free-software movement, for example, and the rise of listservs, and the file-sharing ... movement, which is really a social movement in all but name that is creating pressure for change ... embodied in a movement around sharing information as a gift.
Q. How can we construe intellectual property more expansively?
A. If you're a programmer, or a musician, or a philosopher, or a biologist, or a chemist -- those tend to be fairly separate cultural worlds. But all that we make is now rendered equivalent in the marketplace by the privatizing of information, by intellectual property.
So the first thing is to see a common interest that isn't really addressed by completely privatizing information. It's not in the interest of the United States or any country to make information available only to those who can pay for it. That's not how you advance science. That's not how you advance democracy.
PATENT ISSUES
patent - 1376, shortened form of lettre patent, lit. "open letter," from O.Fr. patente (adj.), also in M.L. (litteræ) patentes, both O.Fr. and M.L. from L. patentum (nom. patens) "open, lying open," prp. of patere "lie open, be open." Sense of "open to view, plain, clear" is first recorded 1508; the verb "to obtain right to land" is 1675; meaning "copyright an invention" is 1822, from meaning "exclusive right, monopoly."
1) Patents were invented to give entrepreneurs incentive to go out there and think it up. Then a patent would protect their ideas from being stolen. This is ok. Now it has gotten out of control. Corporations spend zillions of dollars on lawyers to get congress passing laws that protect their "property".
2) When you patent software (think microsoft) it means that it takes away the right of anybody else in our world, our culture, our society to improve it. Their license says they own it. If you tried to improve it for your own use, on your own machine, for your own business, they can come and arrest you!
3) You are stuck with the product you bought from microsoft, bugs and all. This works against the consumer. This is why open source code has become a major alternative. Now a person can improve the program to meet their own needs, kill bugs, make the program do stuff it didn't do before, stuff you need it to do - without fear of going to jail.
Search for the applied patents granted patents, and patent applications. Patent Office Puts Applications Online published patent applications under the American Inventors Protection Act. New applications will be published every Thursday.
Patent and Trademark Depository Library
OK - if you can't patent it then g'head copyright it instead.
Intellectual Improprieties A leading gadfly picks some of the worst patents of all time - stupid patents issued by the USPTO
Cornell sues H-P for patent infringement Damages may exceed $100M
- FAIR USE VS. DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT
- GOOGLE DIGITIZING IN-COPYRIGHT BOOKS
- IP MUSIC LAW
- CopyOwn: Copyright Ownership Guide for the Higher Education Community
- Internet Intellectual Property Mall
- Researching Intellectual Property Law in an International Context
- European Patent Office
- Yale University Engineering and Applied Science Library
- WEB LAW FAQ 1996-99
- PATENT LAW worldwide patent office sites, legal search engines, legal templates, and patent law firms.
- TRIPS, "trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights,"
- Union of BC Indian Chiefs' Email Distribution List
Protecting Knowledge: Traditional Resource Rights in the New Millennium.The purpose of this list is provide information relating to Indigenous Intellectual Property Rights / Traditional Resource Rights in the areas of culture and heritage.