Dan’s blog

For anybody who thinks software has it bad with patents, you should see what goes on in the world of seeds and farmers.

Take a look at the latest Monsanto case to come out of the Fed. Circuit

The fact that a patented technology can replicate itself does not give a purchaser the right to use replicated copies of the technology. Applying the first sale doctrine to subsequent generations of self-replicating technology would eviscerate the rights of the patent holder.

We wouldn’t want a silly thing like nature or farmers planting seedlings to get in the way of IP rights or anything like that.

I’ll avoid commenting on the rest of the issues of the case, particularly the antitrust arguments, because there was at least a sane dissent by Judge Dyk about it.

With helping launch google code hosting, my honeymoon, and Melissa taking the bar exam, i’ve been ridiculously busy the past month.  Out of the past 4 weeks, i’ve only been home 6 days.

This is why there is a lack of updates recently.

Rest assured i’m still alive, and will make some GCC and Patent Law posts soon.

The conversion is complete.

There are still some badly formatted pages, just correct them when you run across them.

On some very young girl, was an orange sticker that read “SFO TSA Junior Screener”.

GCC Wiki is in the process of moving from phpwiki to MoinMoin.
Besides being much easier to administer and extend, it will enable me to deal effectively with the spam we’ve been getting lately.

This is in progress, and should be completely finished soon.

As SVK and NFS users, the fsfs backend of Subversion, while having okay performance, could stand a lot of improvement.

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It looks like the peer to peer patent review system is finally going live.  The PTO has scheduled a briefing on May 12th to talk more about it.

I’ve officially started at Google, and was in Mountain View the past two weeks for new hire training. I also spoke at the Gelato conference, which had a GCC track. It was enjoyable, as I got to catch up with a lot of people who have made the mistake choice of living in California.

Me, I’m somewhat happy to travel back to Maryland. I like California, and it seems a nice place to visit, but there’s something about it I just can’t put my finger on. Also, when I left Maryland there were still boxes to unpack, which means Melissa is undoubtedly annoyed at me that I left her unpacking :).
Anyway, one of my first tasks while at Google will be to implement merge tracking for Subversion. This is a long requested feature from many people, including GCC folks.

As some of you know, I currently work for IBM Research in NY. My fiancee and I will be moving to Maryland in early April, and as part of that move, I am leaving my job with IBM Research, and joining Google’s brand new D.C. office.

IBM Research has been very good to me, and is an amazing place to work. I will miss the people I have met there. However, I also look forward to working for Google, even though I’m not allowed to say what I will be doing for Google.

For those wondering, I will still be very active in both the GCC and Subversion communities, and will be contributing time and code to both of them. CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED.

If you want a prime example of obviousness silliness by the Federal Circuit (The US court that handles all patent appeals), let’s take a non-precedential opinion issued yesterday, In Re Michael C. Scroggie (Fed. Cir. March 13, 2006).

Mr. Scroggie appealed the Board’s decision affirming a final rejection of his patent application having claims directed to a method for generating a web page (including the limitations “generating page data” and “personalized web page”). The Federal Circuit reversed.

Both the Board and the Director apply an unreasonable construction to the term “generating page data” such that Angles, which teaches “selecting” advertisements which contain hyper-links can somehow teach or suggest “generating.” Generating does not imply a mere selection of pre-existing page data, but rather the creation or origination of such data. Therefore, the Board’s construction of “generating page data” was unreasonable and its conclusion that Angles teaches that limitation is thus unsupported by substantial evidence.

Yes. It’s completely non-obvious that given the idea of selecting pre-existing data to put into a page, one could simply generate some of it on the fly instead. Furthermore, it’s not even reasonable! Good thing you also aren’t allowed to rely on the common level of skill in the art, and common sense, when determining obviousness (cute judicially added restrictions that you will find nowhere in the various patent law statutes). Wouldn’t want to stop the innovation train.

After all, i’m sure you are all familiar with the name Scroggie! He’s the one who invented generating page data based on personalized information, back in 1998.

Sigh.