Intel Sued Over Core 2 Duo Patent Infringement 216
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like Intel is being sued over a patent infringement alleged to be in the Core 2 Duo microprocessor design. 'The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) is charging Intel Corporation with patent infringement of a University of Wisconsin-Madison invention that significantly improves the efficiency and speed of computer processing. The foundation's complaint identifies the Intel CoreTM 2 Duo microarchitecture as infringing WARF's United States Patent No. 5,781,752, entitled "Table Based Data Speculation Circuit for Parallel Processing Computer." WARF contacted Intel in 2001, and made repeated attempts, including meeting face-to-face with company representatives, to offer legal licensing opportunities for the technology.' The text of the complaint [PDF] is also available via WARF's site."
Eat any good books lately? (Score:5, Funny)
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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No, that's Barf, short for Barfolomew. He's a mog. Half man, half dog.
[ot] comic-store-guy says: (Score:5, Funny)
Not a Troll then? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not a Troll then? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And let's not forget it's extremely expensive to file lawsuits. If anything it's in the best interest of the patent holder to come to some agreement rather than go to court. Sure they'll get their court costs back if they win, but who can afford to drop tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a few years?
Trust me, unless they're incredibly wealthy no one wants to go to court
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Disclaimer: I used to work for Intel, and I'm familiar with a lot of the CS/CA people at Madison. I also own Intel stock, and am not looking forward to another $500 million payout to lawyers.
The memory disambiguation table is a variant on a branch predictor (I'm not going to give the exact Intel algorithm). It's obvious. The only reason no one has done it before is that the benefits didn't outweigh the implementation (and especially, v
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The memory disambiguation table is a variant on a branch predictor (I'm not going to give the exact Intel algorithm). It's obvious. The only reason no one has done it before is that the benefits didn't outweigh the implementation (and especially, validation) costs. Core 2 is a big enough machine that it's worthwhile.
Here is how I understand what Intel does from the publicly available description: The processor often encounters load instructions, where the memory in question may or may not have been modified by a previous write instruction. (The "may or may not" case happens when a previous store instruction has not finished calculating its address yet. The case that the processor _knows_ the data has been modified is something entirely different). This situation happens quite often, and quite often the store instructi
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This is, of course, why software patents are bad - they're usually obviated in fewer than 5.
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Actually, I'm curious why the only two coherent posts at the time of this writing are jumping to the defense of this patent; one of them noting that he hasn't read the link but that nonetheless
Now that you mention it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Universities have seen the patent system as the cash cow it is and haven't thought this through.
Re:Now that you mention it... (Score:4, Interesting)
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But they should be made publicly available if the university benefits from public funds
Not trolling, but definitely playing Devil's Advocate here: so what if a university benefits from public funds? Don't many privately held corporations benefit from public funds (from infrastructure - roads - to services, to selling product that is paid for in 'public funds')?
My point is that the idea of 'benefiting from public funds' is a slippery one, and that segmenting patent applicability by some measure of the use of public funds in developing a patent is a complex issue.
And I'm not expressing s
Re:Now that you mention it... (Score:5, Insightful)
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How much is returned to the public? WARF has put almost $1 billion back into research at the University ($50 million last year) and supported 1500 seperate research projects last year. Not to mention that there are 1000's of people employeed around the state in the private sector at small biotech companies and other firms developing products off of WARF licensed technologies.
Though, my question is, of those 1500 research projects, how many of them came to a new radical conclusion, or provided information that is useful?
When I was doing research, I remember only a very small percentage of research actually provided something useful. Most research proved nothing, or just confirmed what we already knew. This research however was in medical sciences, so I'm not sure exactly how much can translate to engineering type research, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were similar.
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Re:Now that you mention it... (Score:5, Informative)
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There's just not enough public funding to go around. If you'd worked at a University, you would know this. In no way does this mean that the University has become "corrupted".
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It means that the soc
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I have a faculty position at a public university, and believe me: you do NOT want to pay the taxes you'd have to pay if all my research activities (and those of my colleagues) were publically funded. So it is either private funds or reduced research activities. Guess which one is better for society?
There is a role for both public and private fundin
Re:Now that you mention it... .. Well, then... (Score:2)
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I know that at my university, and it seemed many similar universities, a huge draw for getting the best and brightest individuals around into the doctoral program is that if you invent something, you can actually make money on it. For instance, at MIT, one third of the proceeds of any patents go directly to the inventors, one third goes to fund the lab that they work in, and one third goes to MIT. This makes it massively more attractive for inventors such as myself to come here. It is true that my work is f
Universities Are Good (Sometimes) (Score:5, Insightful)
Although, you should note that a couple decades ago, universities were not well funded so some senators passed a bill that would allow them to keep patents. Why not, they do the research? Today, universities are still building those portfolios [uspto.gov]. So the joke is kind of on the companies. If they were smart, they should have been dumping millions into universities in the form of donations to keep patents in the corporate sector.
You can bet that as you start to see what was once cutting edge theory be implemented the universities will have the last laugh and hopefully the most cash. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing it any other way but I'm still paying off my college loans. It would make me a happy man to see an HD DVD/Blu Ray player cost $100 more while poor people can go to college for virtually free. But I think a lot of people would call me some sort of communist for that and that I'd be stagnating the economy or some such theory that I can't comprehend. Regardless, I'd be willing to buy shares in certain universities if I could. Imagine what those portfolios are going to start to bring in in revenue!
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Actually, I don't think education can be a bad thing. Indoctrination, on the other hand...
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I have an engineering degree, which apparently entitles me to such things as straight no time-and-a-half overtime and less wage than any unskilled union laborer.
...It does get a little daunting when everyone I know who went to college makes less than those who didn't.
Your college degree in engineering does not mean that you automatically provide valuable engineering services to a company.
Your engineering degree only entitles you to write "I have an Engineering Degree" on your job applications. After that, it's up to you to land a good job, impress the right people, earn raises and promotions, or create an invention and monetize it, etc.
If you're truly making less wage than any "unskilled union laborer", then perhaps your business skills are lacking? You might be a geni
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Your college degree in engineering does not mean that you automatically provide valuable engineering services to a company.
I wish I had points for you. These days every kid out of high school seems to be shuffling off to college with mom and dad's credit card to get a business management or marketing degree, boozing it up on thursday nights and missing tests on friday mornings, with every expectation that when they finally get through their 4 years of drunken stupor they will emerge into a world that wants to throw money at them for being so highly educated and accustomed to privilege. In reality, however, the degree itself
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A sanitation worker makes maybe 30k:
http://www.cbsalary.com/national-salary-chart.aspx?specialty=Sanitation+Worker&cty=&sid=&kw=Sanitation&jn=jn013&edu=&tid=94858 [cbsalary.com]
His degreed supervisor makes more like 50k:
http://www.cbsalary.com/national-salary-chart.aspx?specialty=Sanitation+Supervisor&cty=&sid=&kw=Sanitation&jn=jn037&edu=&tid=82245 [cbsalary.com]
A warehouse laborer makes even less (20k):
http://www.cbsalary.com/national-salary-cha [cbsalary.com]
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A close friend of mine sandblasts & repaints bridges for a living. Showed $98k on his W2, which doesn't include the insane retirement plan, vacation and medical benefits he receives that all FAR, FAR outstrip anything I've ever heard of in the white-collar world, and with the under-the-table kind of things that go on in their industry, just imagine what he actually made.
We don't normally compare paychecks, but an engineering-degreed friend of mine drunkenly told me about the big raise he got after 3 ye
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I had thought you were discussing unskilled labor. Skilled laborers like electricians definitely make more, though again, you have to get through your apprenticeship, and then you have to fill your hours. Getting 40 hours of work a week in those kinds of jobs isn't trivial, and there are certainly other downsides to those jobs. But yes, the top of the field in skilled labor makes about the same as the middle of the field in degreed labor. But: skilled lab
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Just because it's not a troll doesn't mean it's a good patent. It may be that the solution is obvious to one "skilled in the art" even though no one seriously considered the problem before. Just because the university thought of it first doesn't mean it's a good patent.
Of course, I haven't looked at the details of the patent or the case. It may well be a blatant attempt by Intel to rip off a clever idea from the university. My guess is that reality is somewhere in between...
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The way I see it, if you offer to license a technology and then five years later, the company starts using that technology in a new design without licensing it, chances are, the person who holds the patent is not a patent troll. Patent trolls patent something obvious, wait in silence for somebody to do what is covered by their patent, then offer to license and/or sue. If they're offering to license it before the company they're trying to license it to thinks of the idea, unless the idea is fairly trivial,
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W You can bet that as you start to see what was once cutting edge theory be implemented the universities will have the last laugh and hopefully the most cash. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing it any other way but I'm still paying off my college loans. It would make me a happy man to see an HD DVD/Blu Ray player cost $100 more while poor people can go to college for virtually free.
As someone who once was a collegiate instructor and employee, I can say for certain that no self-respecting board-of-regents-member college would even think of lowering tuition, for any reason. Scholarships, sure... as long as the money comes out of somebody else's wallet. Student financial aid? Again, they love it - but on the same premise as Scholarships. Work-Study programs? Okay, but it's the equivalent of getting offshore-priced labor on their part.
No, my friend... no way in Hell you'd ever see a
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any decent football programs brings in millions more than they spend. just in case you thought it was wasted money, it usually is not.
While that condition is true for only (roughly) 36-48 universities and colleges nation-wide, I do not argue that those who have a prominent place in, say, the NCAA (US football org) can rake in megabucks per year. (Everyone else scrapes by as best they can, or they simply do without).
Meanwhile, we have, as perfect example, these beasties [utah.edu] (PDF). Don't ask about the price tags.
Granted that at least half of these are working hospitals, but the majority of the inbound dough isn't coming out of the Ute fo
Re:Universities Are Good (Sometimes) (Score:5, Interesting)
Important point (Score:2)
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Intel is also full of Smart people established in their field.
Plus, argument from authority is a logical fallacy.
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Well, yeah, the way this is normally discussed, the conversation usually turns towards someones irrational communist leanings about how "some people" should pay for "everybody else" to go to college. Nevermind that not eve
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But, a corollary I can imagine is that if corporations fund schools, they'll nag the government/s for major tax breaks. Then, they'll offer lower salaries "since your school was free for you...", and then government might find some weasel means to increase public taxes to make up for the taxes major corporations excused themselves from by thre
Filing in E.D. Texas is Infringement 101 (Score:2)
Filed by a lawyer in Marshall, Texas means troll for sure though.
It means the lawyer is of average or better intelligence. The Eastern District of Texas has swiftly built a reputation for being friendly to patent holders. It also has a rep for getting a large number of patent decisions overturned on appeal. But if you're a patent holder and you want the best chance of winning, you angle for E.D. Texas.
If you held a patent, would you *not* try to file in a district that is generally favorable to patent
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Not every patent is a troll. And I have no clue if this one is or not.
But when I saw this the thought came to me. The very same companies that support the patent system and produce a product are going to get sued out of existence. Or end up raising the costs of their products. An example, say $100 for the processor, and $60 for lawyers and $50 for patent charges, total $210 per processor.
Now what is going to happen is the Intel's and the Microsoft companies are going to realize all a long, /.ers are r
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FTFA:
Personally I think the nice people at WARF can go fuck themselves. That technology was developed with public funds and/or tax deductible donations to an educational institution and in my opinion the patent should belong to the people of the USA, because otherwise you provide too much economic incentive for the s
Could this one be legit? (Score:2)
I haven't read the article, and doubt I would have any chance of understanding the details of the patent, but from the summary it sounds like this patent might actually be a reasonable one: it's a particular method for increasing speed in a particular part of a processor, not "a patent on speeding up computers".
For once, might the patent system actually be doing what it's supposed to?
Dan Aris
Re:Could this one be legit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly not, if these people had to fight Intel for 7 years and still haven't gotten a cent for licensing.
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Just the fact that this is about the microprocessor design and not about software makes it sound much more sensible than much of the other patent crap that is coming up here on
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That said, the description is kind of vague. Does it mean creating a table of opcodes and doing branch prediction based on the table? If so that would probably be patent troll area. My guess is that it's something far m
I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
Yes... (Score:2)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
I worked with the HP PA8000 processor since around 1994. It was an out-of-order CPU, meaning it would execute past cache misses or other long delays to find future instructions which it could do now to save time later. The big win for out-of-order is that it can start cache misses for future work early, acting as a prefetch to bring data into the cache.
Unfortunately, sometimes bad speculation can cause a loop of instructions to result in future instructions causing misses that won't be needed, or other bad effects like starting a divide, and blocking the divide unit for a long time for a divide that won't be used. Recovering from this bad speculation takes time and so it's a performance loss. These are second-order effects--the out-of-order is a big enough win that it almost always outweighs any drawbacks.
All current major CPU designs use out-of-order execution, so everyone's aware of these issues now. I remember at the time looking at a bus trace of some code running on the PA8000 and remarking to the CPU designers at HP that they could improve performance by trying to avoid mis-speculating over and over. At that time, it wasn't worth the silicon space to try to fix it. I'm saying this to show it's obvious speculation can cause some performance issues.
And this is the problem with patents--technology changed so that now it's worth it to spend silicon to fix this problem, to eek out another 1-2% performance. And once it's been decided to fix it, there are some obvious ideas. Like modify the branch prediction hardware to add some state to track that a branch is not being predicted well, to tone down execution after that branch. Or doing whatever it is this patent says to do.
But since academic research often doesn't concern itself with practicalities as silicon real estate, it doesn't surprise me that some university has looked into this problem before Intel. And patents are a way to show you're doing research. However, ask 10 CPU designers how to fix bad speculation, and I would be surprised if several of them didn't give an idea that would infringe on this patent. So is the patent really novel or non-obvious? (I'm aware of the legal definition of obvious, which almost always makes any patent legally non-obvious).
However, I don't necessarily have much sympathy for Intel since they use patents to bar competitors from directly interfacing with their chips. If you control a bus specification, you can add an oddball design quirk, patent it, and thereby block competitors from using your bus. I tried to find the patent for "Intel burst order", but couldn't find it in a few minutes of trying.
Intel is probably a good target to sue for patent infringement because they rely on patents and so are less likely to want to set any precedents weakening their own patents. Generally, they go for cross-licensing, which won't make much sense in this case, though.
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If someone believes otherwise, you probably already know which technology companies you'd feel right at home at.
A more funny response would be to pick up a phone and over the dialtone shout and ask the NSA for my web browsing history. I didn't just give that answer since I'm annoyed at how many people seem to think lying and cheating are OK.
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The invention is the idea, so a flowchart works. The requirement is that you've "reduced the idea to practice." So in this case a logic circuit simulation (not hardware) or more abstract behavioral simulation would be sufficient.
So basically to patent an idea, you should demonstrate that it will work, not
Honor huh? (Score:2)
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The way I see it (Score:2, Funny)
The Final Frontier (Score:5, Funny)
My guess it that it's legit (Score:5, Informative)
It was founded in the 1920s by a professor who invented the process for putting vitamin D in milk.
I believe they also had the patent for homogenizing milk (do you see a pattern here?)
And then, of course, there is WARFarin, the trade name for the anti-coagulation agent dicoumadin, which was discovered when a distressed farmer showed up at the University of Wisconsin's ag school with a bucket of blood from a dead heifer (the pattern continues) and wanted to know what had happened.
Re:My guess it that it's legit (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:My guess it that it's legit (Score:4, Funny)
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Is this a publicly funded University? (Score:2)
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The FUN thing about non-profits however is that the people who administer the non-profit ARE entitled to draw a salary for running the thing. After all fair is fair, right?
if(income > cost){
salary = income - cost;
profit =
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The FUN thing about non-profits however is that the people who administer the non-profit ARE entitled to draw a salary for running the thing. After all fair is fair, right?
That's why a board of directors controls salaries for the executive employees of the non-profit organization. In principle, they provide oversight and make sure the executives aren't drawing excessive salaries from the organization's revenues. But in practice there's always the chance for corruption or conflict of interest [bizjournals.com].
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Patent troll or not? (Score:2)
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You have a professor who is a well respected in the area of computer architecture disclosing details of this idea to Intel many years before Intel actually started using the technology. You have an institution that attempted to license those rights before Intel started using the technology, but whose attempts were thwarted. That same institution's attempts to negotiate a license were again thwarted less than 5 years after Intel start produ
I happen to work in WARF (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I happen to work in WARF (Score:4, Insightful)
And contrary to your assertions, the whole point is that by giving the universities the right to acquire title to the invention and then imposing commercialization obligations upon them means more of the inventions actually will get to market. Now its true, it some cases this probably doesn't work, for example, a blockbuster technology that everyone would adopt. But that's not most technology. Indeed, doing something that everyone else can do is not usually very profitable.
The reason the patent is a good tool for this is actually a result of the market. Most companies want patent protection because it gives them an advantage in the marketplace. So by allowing universities to patent those inventions, they have a tool to license the technology in order to commercialize it--basically giving the licensing company an extra incentive to actually exploit the technology.
As a significant note, you can read about how infrequently technology was commercialized prior to Bayh-Dole. The numbers are quite staggering. Most "inventions" were never licensed. The federal government retained title to all of its funded inventions, and very little commercialization was done.
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Imagine the gall. A university conducts research that results a useful, novel, and hopefully non-obvious technology, and they have the nerve to patent that technology. Then they have the nerve to ask for licensing revenue, and use the revenue to fund the university so that it can educate more students, and conduct more research, and maintain its facilities. Of
Not first time (Score:2, Informative)
So Intel uses Klingon technology (Score:4, Funny)
Happened to Sony and IBM also (Score:2)
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Luckily, most of that money goes back to University research and the inventors...
I was ok or had mixed feelings (tending to ok) on the whole issue of universities owning patents and being afforded all rights thereto, until I read your comment.
Now, the hair on the back of my neck is up.
Is it just me, or isn't it true that virtually all out-of-court settlements are kept private?
I do not live in a world where I trust any university to receive sums from corporations with totals to be kept secrect, and be confident of where the money went.
Hail, hail our alma maters and all that - but I bet
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From http://www.warf.org/inventors/index.jsp?cid=7 [warf.org]
Core-specific? (Score:2)
If a university can hold a patent... (Score:2)
Or atleast the part of my taxes that went to the university (in my case Maryland and Hopkins).
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As long as patents, copyrights, etc. can be bought and sold, they are NOT about "credit where credit is due".
Re:Another good example... (Score:5, Informative)
A quick view of the WARF website has a whole page on the royalty distribution: http://warf.ws/inventors/index.jsp?cid=14&scid=40 [warf.ws]
Of significant note:
You could at least get your complaints right.
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Patents (copyright, trademarks, etc) are not bad, they give credit where credit is due...
its most (but not all) of the laws surrounding patents and copyrights, that are bad.
Patents are bad because their only effect is funneling resources from the fast, high-powered, creative, dynamic people in the world to the retarded lazy dullards who think thy only ever have to do one single clever thing in their entire life and should get paid for it from here on in perpetuity.
To the creative people amongst us, who create new things, new processes, new ideas, new concepts, new knowledge, new value on a daily basis, Imaginary Property merely gets in the way. It hampers me daily in my at
Re:Another good example... (Score:5, Insightful)
So you mean that patents are working?
In all seriousness though, you're hardly "innovating" in any sense of the word if you're doing things that have been described by someone else in a patent filed so long ago that it's issued. That's just about the craziest reasoning I've seen on slashdot.
But more to your original point, the idea of patents is to prevent "parasitic maggots" that capitalize, copy, and lazily "innovate" using someone else's effort. So, rather than the patent being parasitic, the system that you advocate for actually promotes and fosters laziness all the while minimizing the reward to the originator.
And, there is no system of patents that guarantees payment in perpetuity. Once you consider the fact that it takes years to get through the patent office, in many fields the lifetime of a patent is relatively short in business terms. **
Now, I'm not going to defend EVERY patent out there. Hell, I've seen my fair share that are incomprehensible and/or entirely obvious (both in the legal and technical sense). This does not seem to be the case here--at least not yet.
I'll probably get modded down as a troll and blow what karma I do have since you voice a very popular opinion. But, I'll do it anyway.
[** Copyright, on the other hand, does come much closer. When you're discussing about protecting anything at the "author's life+" then you're talking about a long time relative to any particular individual.]
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Imagine there's a task. Call it a XYZ task. And someone who has to perform it a lot says something like "this would be so much easier if there was an XYZ gadget that would kinda work like this and work by that principle -- that wouldn't be hard to produce. Why doesn't anybody make such a thing?" And that person looks it up on the web and indeed, such a gadget cannot be bought anywhere.
Situation 1: how things should work:
Person goes and starts manufactuing the XYZ-gadget. It's not like he wants to make a
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