cduan

This will inevitably draw comparisons to Knuth's METAFONT and Computer Modern font family (as it should). It does suggest, to me, one particularly interesting use case: one could automatically measure parameters for an existing font, and generate similar-looking characters that might be missing from the font (e.g., small caps, Greek letters, Cyrillic, etc.). I programmed this once many years ago, using some ridiculously complicated PostScript and METAFONT programming, but I've since forgotten how that old code works.

The point of PG's essay is well-taken, but I'm not really sure how the linked article really applies other than at a superficial level. I can't find a recent press release from which this article was derived; the closest one is the cited Bain & Co. note from Oct. 2012, which is pretty old by current standards.

Additionally, the reporter here seems to have at least done a modicum of original research, given that he's quoting actual clothing makers. This is in contrast with the USA Today article cited in PG's essay, which quoted a PR guy, a GQ editor, and a consultant.

Thus, to the extent that the submarine theory applies here, it's probably just to show the long reach that a well-manufactured eight-year-old marketing campaign can have. But there were plenty of other marketing campaigns from that time that didn't stick around this long, so maybe that's an indicator that there is some real substance to this trend?

Of course, I've only done a little research into this. If someone can turn up the actual press release or other marketing push from which this article was derived, I will gladly reverse my opinion.

So here's what I gather, after having read the lower court opinion and several of the briefs.

Monsanto owns a patent on certain soybean seeds. They sell 1G seeds to farmers, allowing the farmers to grow them into 2G seeds. The farmers are not licensed to plant the 2G seeds. Bowman bought some 2G seeds and planted them, and Monsanto sued.

Bowman says that the planting of 2G seeds is permitted under the doctrine of "patent exhaustion." According to that doctrine, if a patented physical object is sold under proper license, then a patent lawsuit involving that same physical object is not permitted, even if the object is sold to someone else.

The lower court said that patent exhaustion doesn't apply to the 2G seeds, because Monsanto only granted a license on the 1G seeds. The 1G seeds are not the same physical object as the 2G seeds.

At first I thought this was a simple case, but Bowman is making a very interesting argument in the Supreme Court. It is based on an old case called Quanta.

In Quanta, the patent was directed to a certain computer process, and the patent owner sold computer chips with circuitry for performing that process. The chips themselves were useless, of course, but they just needed to be combined with some standard hardware and turned on to work. Did this mean that, by adding the extra hardware, a new physical object had been made that could be the subject of a lawsuit? The Supreme Court said no: because the chips "embodied" the patented invention and only required standard hardware to be added, the chips invoked patent exhaustion, so lawsuits based on their further use were barred.

Bowman's argument: the 1G seeds "embody" the invention (by having the DNA and biological machinery to produce 2G seeds), and only "standard hardware" (soil, watering, etc.) needs to be added to get the working invention (the 2G seeds), so therefore the 2G seeds fall under patent exhaustion.

The main counterargument is that in Quanta, the original computer chips were still present and intact, whereas the 2G seeds do not include the 1G seeds intact. This requires a narrower interpretation of Quanta, and I could see the Supreme Court going with either this narrower reading or Bowman's broader one.

(For fun, you can try to come up with hypothetical cases that are in between: what if the patentee in Quanta had sold semiconductor masks for making chips?)

I wonder if this algorithm would still present biases given the fact that large cities tend to vote differently from less densely populated areas. My hypothesis is that this algorithm would favor city voters over rural voters, for the following reasons:

1. Successfully gerrymandering in favor of one party generally involves stuffing the other party's voters into one district, while splitting your party's voters into multiple districts.

2. The proposed algorithm favors straight-line divisions through regions such that about half the population of the region is on each side of the division.

3. Thus, chances are, the straight lines will run through the middles of cities, cutting cities into multiple districts.

I'd be interested to see someone test this out--it's likely that my hypothesis is wrong, but it also seems pretty likely to me that there will be at least some urban/rural bias, one way or another.

The reason for setting up a DMCA takedown policy is precisely so that the site doesn't have to deal with copyright infringement: by doing a fairly minimal task of responding to takedown notices, the site operator gets freedom from liability for pretty much any related copyright infringement lawsuit (which otherwise could cost a lot of time and money).

It's pretty easy to set yourself up with such a policy, and anyone running a site that includes user-provided content should have one. EFF used to run a startup boot camp that went through all the steps of how to do it, and if they still offer it I would recommend it.

Interesting--there is an email address listed. Wonder what happens if you email your notification there? Presumably, if you do, you are in compliance with the statute, regardless of the no-email policy, so they would have to do the takedown.