www/server/staging software-patents.html

[Dora Scilipoti]

CVSROOT:        /web/www
Module name:    www
Changes by:     Dora Scilipoti <dora>   22/12/07 04:00:35

Modified files:
        server/staging : software-patents.html 

Log message:
        More changes after confronting text with audio.

CVSWeb URLs:
http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/www/server/staging/software-patents.html?cvsroot=www&r1=1.3&r2=1.4

Patches:
Index: software-patents.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /web/www/www/server/staging/software-patents.html,v
retrieving revision 1.3
retrieving revision 1.4
diff -u -b -r1.3 -r1.4
--- software-patents.html       5 Dec 2022 23:28:39 -0000       1.3
+++ software-patents.html       7 Dec 2022 09:00:32 -0000       1.4
@@ -507,7 +507,7 @@
 <p>
 Here is another point I should mention, that sometimes a company or
 consortium can make a format or protocol a de-facto standard.  Then,
-if that format or protocol is patented, that is a real disaster for
+if that format or protocol is patented, that's a real disaster for
 you.  There are even official standards that are restricted by
 patents.  There was a big political uproar last September when the
 <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/patent-practice/";>World Wide Web
@@ -527,7 +527,7 @@
 </dd>
 <!-- 25:18 -->
 
-<dt id="patent-licensing">2) Licensing the patent</dt>
+<dt id="patent-licensing">2. Licensing the patent</dt>
 <dd>
 <p>
 The second possibility is, instead of avoiding the patent, to get a
@@ -554,10 +554,10 @@
 anything.  You did it once. Now you can do it any number of times,
 make a subroutine.  They think that if you do anything twice instead of
 once, you made a new invention. That somehow means you are brilliant and nobody
-can possibly argue with you, {you're} right to boss them around and
-restrict them.  Anyway, he was not offered a license, and he had to shut down.
+can possibly argue with your right to boss them around and
+restrict them.  Anyway, he wasn't offered a license, and he had to shut down.
 He couldn't even afford really to go to court.  I would say that
-particular patent was an obvious idea.  It is possible that a judge
+particular patent was an obvious idea.  It's possible that a judge
 might have agreed.  We will never know, though, because he could not afford
 to go to court.
 </p>
@@ -599,10 +599,10 @@
 <p>
 What does this really mean?
 What is the benefit that IBM gets from this access to the patents of
-others?  It is basically the benefit of being excused from the trouble
+others?  It's basically the benefit of being excused from the trouble
 that the patent system can cause you.  The patent system is like a
 lottery.  What happens with any given patent could be nothing, could
-be a windfall for some patent holder or a disaster for everyone else.
+be a windfall for some patent holder and a disaster for everyone else.
 But IBM being so big, for them it averages out.  They get to measure
 the average harm and good of the patent system.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>For them, the trouble
@@ -625,10 +625,10 @@
 are going to go into competition with him, take away all the business
 and he'll &ldquo;starve&rdquo;?
 <!-- 31:33 -->
-<span class="gnun-split"></span>I will have to point out that people
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>Well, I have to point out that people
 in high tech fields are not generally working on their own, and that ideas
 don't come in a vacuum&mdash;they are based on the work of others&mdash;and 
that
-these people have a pretty good chance of getting a job if they need to
+these people have pretty good chances of getting a job if they need to
 these days.  So this scenario, the idea that this brilliant idea came
 from this one person working alone, is unrealistic, and the idea
 that he is in danger of starving is unrealistic.  But it is conceivable
@@ -654,7 +654,7 @@
 <!-- 33:22 -->
 <p>
 The mega-corporations avoid, for the most part, the harm of the patent
-system.  They see mainly the good side. That is why they want to have
+system.  They see mainly the good side. That's why they want to have
 software patents.  They are the ones who will benefit from it.  But if
 you are really a small inventor, or work for a small company, the small
 company is not going to be able to do this.  They try.  The problem is
@@ -700,11 +700,11 @@
 </p>
 </dd>
 
-<dt id="patent-overturning">3) Overturning the patent in court</dt>
+<dt id="patent-overturning">3. Overturning the patent in court</dt>
 <dd>
 <p>
 Supposedly, in order to be patented, something has to be new, useful
-and unobvious.  That is the language used in the US.  I think other
+and unobvious.  That's the language used in the US.  I think other
 countries have different language which is pretty much equivalent to
 it.  Of course, when the patent office gets into the game and they start
 interpreting new and unobvious, &ldquo;new&rdquo; turns out to mean
@@ -717,7 +717,7 @@
 at least he used to; I don't know if he can still keep up with them&mdash;said
 that 90% of them wouldn't pass the Crystal City test, which meant,
 if the people in the patent office went outside to the news stand and
-got some computer magazines, they would see that these ideas are
+got some computer magazines, they would see that these ideas were
 already known.
 </p>
 <!-- 36:59 -->
@@ -764,7 +764,7 @@
 stringent about the idea of what is obvious or not.  But the problem
 is it costs millions of dollars to do that.  I heard of one
 patent case, the defendant I remember was Qualcomm, and I believe the
-ruling ultimately was 15 million dollars, of which most went to pay the
+ruling ultimately was 13 million dollars, of which most went to pay the
 lawyers on both sides.  There were a few million dollars left over for
 the plaintiff, because they lost.
 </p>
@@ -791,9 +791,9 @@
 Engelbart's editor.  He is the one who had an idea that was
 interesting to publish.
 <!-- 41:22 -->
-<span class="gnun-split"></span>{What I'd done} I called &ldquo;poor man's
-hypertext,&rdquo; as I
-had to implement it in the context of TECO.  It was not as powerful as
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>I called it &ldquo;poor man's
+hypertext,&rdquo; because I
+had to implement it in the context of TECO.  It wasn't as powerful as
 his hypertext, but it was at least useful for browsing documentation,
 which was all it was meant for, and as for there being dial-up access
 to the system, well, there was, but it didn't occur to me that the one
@@ -842,8 +842,8 @@
 another, and another.  It gets like crossing a minefield.  Each step
 you take, each design decision, probably won't step on a patent. So
 you can take a few steps and, probably, there won't be an explosion.
-But the chance you will get all the way through the minefield and get
-to develop the program you want to develop without ever stepping on a
+But the chance that you will get all the way through the minefield and get
+to develop the program you wanted to develop without ever stepping on a
 patent gets less and less as the program gets bigger.
 </p>
 <!-- 43:38 -->
@@ -881,11 +881,11 @@
 that, if you are designing a new product, you are going to get
 &ldquo;The Patent;&rdquo; the idea that there is one patent per
 product and that it covers <em>the</em> idea of that product.  In some fields
-it is closer to being true.  In other fields it's further from being
+that's closer to being true.  In other fields it's farther from being
 true.  Software is at the opposite extreme.
-This is because software packages are very big, usually.  And they
+This is because software packages are very big, usually, and they
 use many different ideas in a new combination.  If the program is new,
-and not just copied, then it is probably using a different combination
+it's not just copied, then it is probably using a different combination
 of ideas combined, of course, with newly written code, because you
 can't just magically say the names of these ideas and have them work.
 You have to implement them all.
@@ -906,7 +906,7 @@
 If it were one patent-one product, then these patents wouldn't obstruct the
 development of products, because if you developed a new product it
 wouldn't be patented by somebody else already.  But when one product
-corresponds to many different ideas combined, it becomes very likely
+corresponds to many different ideas combined, it becomes very likely that 
 your new product is going to be patented by somebody else already.  In
 fact, there is economic research now showing just how imposing a
 patent system on a field where there is incremental innovation can
@@ -944,12 +944,12 @@
 fracture. <i>[laughs]</i>&nbsp; I don't have to worry whether it will 
oscillate at a
 certain higher frequency and induce a signal in the value of some
 other variable.  I don't have to worry about how much current that
-<code>if</code> statement will draw and whether it can dissipate the
+<code>if</code> statement will draw, whether it can dissipate the
 heat there inside that <code>while</code> statement.  Whether there will be a
 voltage drop across the <code>while</code> statement that will make the
 <code>if</code> statement not function.
 <!-- 50:31 -->
-<span class="gnun-split"></span>I don't have to worry,
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>I don't have to worry that 
 if I run this program in a salt-water environment, that the salt water
 might get in between the <code>if</code> statement and the
 <code>while</code> statement and cause corrosion.  I don't have to
@@ -957,10 +957,10 @@
 the fan-out limit by referring to it too many times.  I don't have to worry,
 when I refer to the variable, how much capacitance it has and whether
 there has been sufficient time to charge up the value.  I don't have
-to worry, when I write the program, about how I am going to physically
+to worry, when I write the program, about how I'm going to physically
 assemble each copy, and whether I can manage to get access to put that
 <code>if</code> statement inside the <code>while</code> statement.
-And I don't have to worry about how I am going to gain access in case the
+And I don't have to worry about how I'm going to gain access in case the
 <code>if</code> statement breaks, to remove it and replace it with a
 new one. <i>[laughs]</i>
 </p>
@@ -977,7 +977,7 @@
 am saying the software system is much easier to design than the
 physical system.  But the intelligence of people in these various
 fields is the same, so what do we do when we are confronted with an
-easy field?  We just push it further!  We push our abilities to the
+easy field?  We just push it farther!  We push our abilities to the
 limit.
 <!-- 52:21 -->
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>If systems of the same size are easy,
@@ -989,7 +989,7 @@
 design has a million pieces in it, that's maybe 300,000 lines, a few
 people will write that in a couple of years.  That's not
 particularly a giant program.  GNU Emacs now has several million pieces
-in its design I think, as it has a million lines of code.  This was a
+in its design I think, because it has a million lines of code.  This was a
 project done with essentially no funding whatsoever.  Mostly done by
 people in their spare time.
 </p>
@@ -1383,7 +1383,7 @@
 
 <p class="unprintable">Updated:
 <!-- timestamp start -->
-$Date: 2022/12/05 23:28:39 $
+$Date: 2022/12/07 09:00:32 $
 <!-- timestamp end -->
 </p>
 </div>