josaka

I suspect it's, in part, because humidity is low. The fab needs to tightly control humidity and temperature. Pulling water from air is energy intensive. Facilities team in the fab I used to work in said their most energy intensive days where the most humid days.

My intuition matches yours. It's abundant enough to find its way into alloys for jet engine blades at single digit percentages: https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/science-features... And if used in chips, you don't need to make the full substrate with this material, just a few hundred nanometers at the top, in the active area.

Same fab, same experience. I would add that a deep understanding (and ability to explain) statistics was more critical than understanding the underlying device physics for most roles I encountered. Enormous amounts of noisy data, characterizing several hundred process steps, is harnessed to apply massive pressure on engineers to "fix" problems that might just be a statistical blip. Economic stakes of minor yield deviations are so high that you often have to act as if something might be wrong before signals reach statistical significance. I bailed after four years, but it was great experience to start my career.

Lawfare did a nice analysis of whether Section 230 shields model hosts (likely no): https://www.lawfareblog.com/section-230-wont-protect-chatgpt Professor Volohk has a public draft article on liability for output of AI models, with an emphasis on defamation: https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/ailibel.pdf

Both suggest that this is a real area of concern. Folks have gotten complacent that Section 230 protects platform providers, but it is not clear that the protection extends to outputs from generative models, indeed one of the Supreme Court Justices implied that it would not in oral arguments for one of the recent Section 230 cases.

It would be wonderful if it was easy for most people to represent themselves. My sense is most people struggle to express themselves precisely and clearly enough to avoid being at a massive disadvantage to someone who can do so. To my untrained eye though, AI seems poised to get us there. What LLMs are doing for code, translating imprecise natural language expressions of intent into machine-readable, precise code, looks similar to what I do as a lawyer when translating between a client request and legal work product. Lots of filling in boilerplate defaults, some assumptions based on context, etc. Differences include that sometimes we engineer ambiguity into that work product, and we can assume an adversary will exploit plausible interpretations unfavorable to our side, but I see no reason AI won't be able to do that as well.

Customers with assets in custodial accounts of an exchange that goes bankrupt are likely general unsecured creditors, and the assets are probably property of the bankruptcy estate. https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2022/02/what-happens...

This means that, in the line of people to get paid out of those assets, you're not even at the front. Custodial accounts leave you with little protection.

Yes, but in practice, this is just an opening offer in a negotiation. Parties will typically counter with something like: depose me in my home town for no more than x hours, and I'll produce what docs I have if you sign a protective order that makes produced info attorney's-eyes-only, i.e., business people cannot review. Unlikely a court would require more than this.

A related issue is whether the availability of AI as a tool for creating innovation should raise the bar for non-obviousness. Both effects could make it harder to obtain patents.

This ruling did not survive on appeal: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=542088572460013...

Bahy-Dole Act and DoD Federal Acquisition Regs. are the answer to your question about "who gets access to these patents" and should be the focus of reform if you find them inadequate. Outside my area of the law, but my understanding is prior to Bahy-Dole, it was common for the Gov. to take title to patents arising from Gov. funded research, and that this was seen as a disincentive to commercializing the technology. So Bahy-Dole adjusted the balance, with certain lesser rights (like march in rights and a license) going to the government to try to drive more commercialization of the technology that was invented under Gov. contracts.

I think this might be the PCT application in question (same name as the founder, and about fusion): https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20... Discusses an "orbital confinement fusion reaction."

(They might be overstating things with "secured a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) International Patent." No such thing as a PCT patent. PCT's are just notice under a set of treaties that you might file an application in any of the 193 WIPO member states. No one ever has asserted a "PCT Patent." That said, PCT applications are examined, but the result is only advisory and countries often reach a different result when the examine the national phase filings.)

It's a common tactic in patents in my experience. You're not going to sue yourself. So you describe your invention in the context in which a competitor would use it. Of course, this would typically be coupled with a disclosure to the examiner that the thing describing the context is in the prior art.

There are gaps, but in almost all cases in the US in my experience, non-inventor owners record their interest in pubic records at the USPTO assignment database to perfect title: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/patent/searc.... If they fail to do this, the previous owner could re-sell the asset to someone else who records and could have superior title. 35 USC 261, para. 4. In practice, gaps arise when patent assets are transferred between entities controlled by the same party, who doesn't need to worry about the prior owner trying to re-sell the same asset they already transferred. But event then, the public records get you pretty close to the owner.

I think the sweet spot for some blockchain use cases is where contract enforcement doesn't work well. It's really hard to seek redress for diffuse, low-grade breach. A 10 million people with one dollar in damages are less likely to be made whole than 1 person with 10 million in damages. And contract enforcement often fails in insolvency. Try enforcing a how warranty against a builder that's gone bankrupt.

True, but there's value in reducing the number of parties you must trust to get something done. It's easy to imagine that, at the margin, there are a subset of collective action problems that will get solved if you can reduce the number of parties that must be trusted. Worrying about the need to sue 3 people has to be better than worrying about the need to sue 6.

After the TX grid failure last winter, it's probably not a coincidence that Samsung's new facility will be near ERCOT's operation center in Taylor, which manages the TX grid, and will likely be the last load to shed when the grid's stressed. Used to work in the Austin fab, and the amount of money lost per minute in a power failure is mind boggling. The tax breaks Taylor offered ($314m) are not that different from what Samsung was reported to have lost due to the grid failure ($270m).

TSA's counsel argued that the asserted patent was obvious in view of one prior art reference that disclosed scanning trays and a second prior art reference that disclosed carts at both ends of a machine processing trays. To make this argument, they needed an expert witness to say that it would have been obvious to combine the two prior art references in the way claimed. My read of this comment is that they failed to get their expert witness on record as having that opinion before trial, and so they were prevented from effectively presenting the position at trial. This is the sort of thing that keeps patent attorneys up at night.

This is probably the key passage in the validity ruling: "Defendant’s disavowal in pretrial practice of having its experts combine prior art was a serious handicap at trial." Not a good place to be as a defendant in a patent suit.

Here's the ruling where validity is analyzed by the court (again, which has not been reviewed on appeal as far as I can tell): https://cite.case.law/fed-cl/129/25/

The most recent ruling in this case is available here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=506583781665731... Validity was addressed back in 2016, but has not been reviewed on appeal yet. If others can find a link to that case, it might help folks understand what's happening here.

Better to look at the claims, which define the scope of rights granted. That said, the broadest claim pretty much tracks this language. I wonder if the broadest claim survived, or if the verdict was based on a narrower dependent claim.

I think rpx and unified patents do something like this.

You can, in some cases, sue for damages accrued up to six years in the past. You don't have to sue for those before the patent expires. You just stop accruing new damages when the patent expires. Past damages is what was allegedly at issue here. (Which is why the attorneys were talking about "marking," as it's a factor in whether you can get pre-suit damages for some types of claims in some cases.)

It's weird, but standard. These exchanges are a formal way of fleshing out what the parties do and do not dispute. Both sides limit what the agree to as much as they can with a straight face, and everything is qualified as much as possible to make it hard to pin you down on something later, after you've learned more about your and their case, e.g., they might disagree that TI is the assignee, or that the language is properly part of the patent b/c it was amended during prosecution or by a certificate of correction.

It's a defense against trolls acquiring those patents and leverage to force license on transfer deals with other large cos.

I think it's because it's dry. Facilities guy in the semi plant I used to work in told me that their highest energy usage was when it was humid, not when it's hot or cold. Said the energy cost to cool the humid air to pull out water and then heat it back up to the fab's target temp was pretty massive.

I should add that the abandoned patent application is a continuation-in-part of two issued patents, if folks are curious: 8,433,617 and 8,346,624, both of which issued before the bar for software patents was raised (and blurred, to mix metaphors) in 2014 by the Supreme Court in Alice v. CLS Bank. Software patents issued before that case tend to not fare well under the current case law and are often thrown out in the first months of a suit (with a few exceptions in certain fora).

That's not a patent. It's a published application, which was abandoned after being rejected by the USPTO. This can be verified on the USPTO's public PAIR system.

The broader point about yokels from rural TX is less true than it used to be. Post 2012, as a practical matter, to assert a patent, you have to survive an IPR challenge, where a group of more experienced technical staff at the USPTO decide whether the invalidate your patent in an adversarial proceeding.

This is the right answer, and it has implications for the development of patent law: folks cheering the restrictions on NDAs should anticipate that doing so will tend to increase pressure on lawmakers to strengthen patent rights, as those investing in R&D lobby for other ways to protect their investments. Not saying we shouldn't weaken NDAs, though. The amazing last century of technical innovation emanating from California, which has relatively strong limits on NDAs, would suggest it's a good idea.

20 years is a good first approximation for patent term. Patents expire 20 years from the first non-provisional priority date in the US, plus whatever term extension is granted by the USPTO to compensate you for USPTO delays, less any term lost for a terminal disclaimer.

It's fair game to sue on an expired patent, because in some cases, you can collect for past damages that accrued up to six years in the past. That's probably why the complaint focused on an older product, potentially sold during the patent term.