[geeks] Doorbells

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 02:21:17PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> 
> To the best of my knowledge, that is actually the case in the US, but,
> it's a law I cannot keep on good conscience.  I do not give the
> government my consent to regulate what I build and create for my own
> purposes (provided I'm not harming others with those creations).

You can in the privacy of your home, or in a commercial labratory
duplicate a patented device. You may then use the device as a basis
for a new, improved device, or a new previously unthought of application.

You may then patent your improvement, as long as you cite the prior art.
You may sell the rights to your patent as long as you disclose the
prior art. You do not have to obtain permission of the owner of a
patent to improve it or patent any improvements. 

However to market such a device, you would have to obtain permission
of the owners of any previous patents that are still in force. So for
example, if you developed a new improved floppy disk, you would have
to go back to the original patents on magnetic data storage, and possibly
the ones going back to the wire recorder as prior art. As for licensing,
you would have to license any that were in effect or wait until they
expired. 

As for software patents, look at LZW. You could develop your own LZW
program and use it on your computer as much as you wanted. As long as
you did not violate the copyright on the original code, you would be fine.

Publishing your code would probably be a patent violation. Many companies
have built their handheld gaming devices with the anticipation that the 
buyer would pirate software to run on it. 

One Korea company in particular. :-) 

A U.S. company advertised the ability as their main product using a
GPL'ed program offered as shareware as the basis of their offering. The
particular program was developed by a "third party". The owners of
patents used by the program, sent a cease and desist letter to the
developer, and within a month the company folded.


> I have to wonder if there's some sort of "fair use" sort of exemption
> for education, though.  One of my assignments my first or second year of
> college was to implement an LZW codec, and the patent on LZW was still
> valid back then.

That's the whole point of a patent. If they did not want to publish it,
they would have left it a trade secret. 

Note that one can not copyright a device, but one can copyright 
artwork, which includes a printed circuit board layout. 

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM