{"id":183641,"date":"2013-01-04T21:07:00","date_gmt":"2013-01-05T02:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/01\/04\/more-ip-insanity\/"},"modified":"2013-01-04T21:07:00","modified_gmt":"2013-01-05T02:07:00","slug":"more-ip-insanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/01\/04\/more-ip-insanity\/","title":{"rendered":"More IP Insanity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the latest case, we have patent trolls <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2013\/01\/patent-trolls-want-1000-for-using-scanners\/\">trying to extort money from small businesses for using scanners<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some \u201cdistributed computer architecture\u201d patents, he didn\u2019t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay\u2014which is to say, just about any business, period.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">If he&#8217;d paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">&#8220;[Hill] was very cordial and very nice,&#8221; he told Ars. &#8220;He said, if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document\u2014we have a patent that covers that as a process.&#8221;<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">t didn\u2019t seem credible that Hill was demanding money for just using basic office equipment exactly the way it was intended to be used. So Vicinanza clarified:<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">&#8220;So you&#8217;re claiming anyone on a network with a scanner owes you a license?&#8221; asked Vicinanza. &#8220;He said, &#8216;Yes, that&#8217;s correct.&#8217; And at that point, I just lost it.&#8221;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The kicker is that the these folks were using newspapers&#8217; &#8220;best places to work&#8221; lists to send out dunning letters.<\/p>\n<p>Seriously, we need to just stop issuing patents until the system is fixed.<\/p>\n<p>H\/t <a href=\"http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/kevin-drum\/2013\/01\/why-software-patents-should-be-banned-case-study\">Kevin Drum<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the latest case, we have patent trolls trying to extort money from small businesses for using scanners: When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some \u201cdistributed computer architecture\u201d patents, he didn\u2019t quite believe it at &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,969,1109,1191,989],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-evil","category-ip","category-patent","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183641"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183641\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}