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Thursday, August 15, 2002Discover Common Goals to Unite Your Teamcomment []
10 tips for shared purpose. Christopher M. Avery has written an article on 10 secrets to a shared purpose. This outlines some tips on how to build an effective and cohesive team: Utah CIO On The Value Of Silly PatentsI appreciate Phil Windley's view on silly patents given my recent study of same in the graphic arts. I suspect Windley is right that pursuing patent enforcement, especially of questionable methods and processes, is a costly endeavor and one that not many companies can withstand.
Of All the Stupid.... The Extortion Business ModelCory's post on bogus patents is of interest because I have just been looking into a similar situation in the graphic arts.
Utterly bogus IMBot patent threatens entire field of innovation. When venture captial dries up, "innovative" companies like ActiveBuddy look for other revenue opportunities. In ActiveBuddy's case, the new money in the door will come from intimidating other technologists who ship instant-messaging bots, a concept on which the enemies of progress at the USPTO have just granted ActiveBuddy a patent. IM bots are an idea with well-known, invalidating prior art going back to well before the ActiveBuddy patent was filed. ActiveBuddy demonstrates its ignorance thus:"I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed (August 22, 2000). I'm certainly not aware of any," said Kay, who doubles as ActiveBuddy's chief technology officer. [...](via /.)[Boing Boing Blog] ImageX, of Kirkland, WA, fits Cory's description above quite well. Launched during the Dot Com bubble, the company has struggled since inception to find success with its e-procurement and e-commerce model, which it describes as follows: ImageX (NASDAQ: IMGX) is a leading provider of Web-based services to streamline the management, production and distribution of business communication materials. But now ImageX has a new plan -- they have applied for patents on close to 60 (some estimates are as high as 90) processes and methods for producing print materials. Three patents have been granted and, at last count, they have received a sixth Notice of Allowance. The problem is these patents appear to be, at best, questionable -- covering ideas and methods which seem to be common and routine rather than any significant new technology or development. The business plan appears to be to get as many of these issues through the USPTO as possible, offer a handful of small firms extremely favorable license terms to establish commercial value, and then wage a legal battle against major players. What this means for industry innovators is unclear, but when a company receives patents for seemingly basic processing of routine operations, it does not bode well for innovators. This could adversely affect any company trying to raise efficiency through automation. More importantly, it raises the spectre of greatly increased burdens to fight legal battles over infringement. It is not clear from reading the ImageX patent data that they actually invented much of anything. Certainly nothing to justify the following claim, which openly states the company's new view of where its money will come from: [...]"These two patents illustrate the uniqueness of our technology and our production process," said Rich Begert, president and CEO. "They are at the core of our patent portfolio, and with three remaining Notices of Allowance and 47 print-related patents pending, we expect to start monetizing our patent portfolio." [WhatTheyThink?] As someone who specializes in process automation for the print industry (not patent law) I have to say this approach to business worries me, but I can't state it any more effectively than Cory: [...]When you file a patent, you aver that you have disclosed all the potentially invalidating prior art you know about. I wonder if there's a basis for pursuing a fraud claim against the inventors whose names are on the patent, since it's hardly credible that they didn't know about all this invalidating prior art before they told the federal government that they'd never heard of any of these well-known technologies.[...] [Boing Boing Blog] The USPTO does not seem competent to review patent applications in the graphic arts, despite the fact that is their job and there is no other agency so defined. But once these patents are on the books -- no matter how frivilous or unwarranted -- it is almost impossible to invalidate them. So this is an important issue for an industry that desperately needs to remain free to innovate. ImageX' new revenue strategy may well be intimidation of big industry players for royalities. If so, it seems a risky bet for all concerned. But I would certainly like to see someone at a major industry provider -- with suitable legal resources -- take a thorough look at this before unwarranted patents get on the books. Does Walmart Buy American?Walmart has been ordered to pay $464,000 in interest and lawyers fees for importing some wireless, rotating spotlights from Hong Kong. Several years ago Walmart was a big supporter of "Buy American". What happened?Judge orders Wal-Mart to pay in patent dispute. Personal VPN RecommendationsI've received two suggestions on my personal VPN query.Personal VPN's without Windows.[Curiouser and curiouser!] This looks like a good solution as long as you don't need (want?) wireless access -- especially since the LinkSys is only $120 at BestBuy. It looks like this unit does everything you need to manage a personal VPN. But I just purchased the D-Link DI614+, with mostly the same features of the LinkSys, sans the VPN endpoint, but with a wireless acces point built in. It supports multiple IPSec or PTP passthru connections, just not a VPN endpoint. So Scott Walker recommended this: Here's how to do it in software on a single-diskette Linux box with two Ethernet cards: Either way it looks like about another hundred $$ -- whether for another router or two ethernet cards and an old 486 PC. I'm inclined to go the Linux route and put it just behind my router, but first I have to learn enough about Linux to do it (or con someone into doing it for me.)
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This Page was last updated: 11/28/2002; 6:09:09 PM
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