Re: The patent process [Was Re: Sharing the Family PC is Patent-Pending]

[A Waterfall That Barks]

Rahul Dhesi wrote:

> Al Dente <jabailo@earthlink.net> writes:
>
>
> > The rest of your points are spurious because they rest on your assertion 
> > that a Patent is a 'law' therefore you re-iterate statements about 
> > 'legislation' in order to effect a comparison.  But a Patent is not a 
> > Law -- it is more what would be called an Entitlement.
>
>
> The above is a pretty stupid comment, given that the original poster was
> quite careful and precise in his wording:
>
>   A patent is a government action -- certainly not a law or an agency
>   regulation in the usual sense, but a government action with the force
>   of law and enforceable through the judicial system, that grants rights
>   to some, takes away rights from others.


My point stands.  The patent is not the 'law' or an 'action' -- the law 
is the intellectual structure that makes the patent possible.   Patent 
is a property 'right', yes.   But the original poster was saying 
something like 'my acre of land is a *law*'

To phrase it in computer terms, the Patent is a program in which certain 
rules are codified.

The Law is a compiler that allows the executable to be created.

The program is not the compiler.


http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/whatis.htm

<quote
  source="U.S. Patent Office">

Some people confuse patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Although there 
may be some similarities among these kinds of intellectual property 
protection, they are different and serve different purposes.

What Is a Patent?
A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the 
inventor, issued by the Patent and Trademark Office. The term of a new 
patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent 
was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an 
earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of 
maintenance fees. US patent grants are effective only within the US, US 
territories, and US possessions.

The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the 
statute and of the grant itself, “the right to exclude others from 
making, using, offering for sale, or selling” the invention in the 
United States or “importing” the invention into the United States. What 
is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or 
import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for 
sale, selling or importing the invention.

What Is a Trademark or Servicemark?
A trademark is a word, name, symbol or device which is used in trade 
with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them 
from the goods of others. A servicemark is the same as a trademark 
except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service 
rather than a product. The terms "trademark" and "mark" are commonly 
used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.

Trademark rights may be used to prevent others from using a confusingly 
similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or 
from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark. 
Trademarks which are used in interstate or foreign commerce may be 
registered with the Patent and Trademark Office. The registration 
procedure for trademarks and general information concerning trademarks 
is described in a separate pamphlet entitled "Basic Facts about Trademarks".

What Is a Copyright?
Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of “original 
works of authorship” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, 
and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished. 
The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the 
exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative 
works, to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work, to 
perform the copyrighted work publicly, or to display the copyrighted 
work publicly.

The copyright protects the form of expression rather than the subject 
matter of the writing. For example, a description of a machine could be 
copyrighted, but this would only prevent others from copying the 
description; it would not prevent others from writing a description of 
their own or from making and using the machine. Copyrights are 
registered by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.
</quote>