Categories
Technology

And now copyrights are fighting with technical evolution

Pardon me for the title. I am not on either side of the balance. Let the law decide who is right and who is wrong. But this one really seems interesting.

This is a continuation of the blog Patents – A boon or a bane, that I wrote recently. And this time it is to do with Copyrights. Without delaying any further let me tell you what I am talking about.

I am talking about the Google Print lawsuit and all the hoopla around it. Google wants to digitize all the books in 3 major libraries of the world and many publishers don't want that to happen.

The ones on Google's side say it helps people in easily searching for collections. You can search for each and every word in each and every page of each and every book that the library has. Seems great for a techie, but the ones against Google say, “It is against the law. Google cannot copyright anything without the prior permission of the publishers. If Google can do it to books, it can then do it to movies, audio and whatever it wants!”

And there is another take of the whole story. What is Google trying to do? Is it trying to grab the data (may be personal) of each and every person? (That is what sounds like the – Aim of Google). How will you feel if someone owns all your data? Is Google a silent killer? (At present it does not seem like one and this seems like a merciless extension of the Google story).

Let's wait and watch.

Categories
Technology

Patents – a boon or a bane?

Recently someone claimed that XML is something that they have patented [News story]. A similar thing happened with JPEG patent [News story].

And then a survey was conducted by AAAS on A Descriptive Analysis of a Pilot Survey on the Effects of Patenting on Science. This survey has reported that 28% of the respondents have abandoned their research projects because of complex licensing negotiations. (How sad!)

There are 2 groups of people: one who support patents and ones who don't. The ones who support patents say that it is good and patents in fact are responsible for innovation to happen. The reasons they give are:
* Patents mean that you disclose something safely and the government grants you exclusive rights over your idea, which means that either another company will have to pay you for the use of your idea or they cannot use it.
* Patents result in people thinking in different ways than one, so that results in innovation.

Both seem to be good observations. But the ones who don't support patents say that, it is in fact hindering innovation. Patents are being misused, especially in the software world [A software patent debate in Wikipedia]. Many basic things, some very obvious things are patented and being misused. For example, extending software functionality has been patented in various forms (although extending something to provide extended/enhanced functionality seems obvious).

My personal take on the issue is that patents in their present form clearly hinder innovation. Keeping the business interests of companies in view, patent procedure should be modified so that misuse does not occur. Or else, there will be people who patent just about anything and everything that they can.

I had recently written about someone who had patented the method of swinging a swing.
While this is not just one of them, there is a very interesting blog entry here, which describes how a person patented a wheel to emphasize the flaws in the patenting system.

Let me end by telling you another shocker: 1/5 of All Human Genes Have Been Patented. So, you have in your body genes that are owned as patents by someone else! 🙂

Categories
General

Humor? Naah…

Method of swinging on a swing

A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other.

Believe it or not, the above paragraph is the abstract of a US patent. 🙂

Here are the details.

And if you want more, here is a list of crazy patents.

Now anyone out there on methods to climb a bus?