Bitcoin Forum

 Have a look at what they are trying to do to us now. Another sleeze lawyer has patented virtual coin making.

http://www.google.com/patents/US20130054471

 

Interesting find. Popcorn time.

That doesn't even come anywhere close to describing Bitcoin. It's a completely different "protocol".

I don't think any of this will go very far.

Now why is it that we are the first ones to get blamed?

Because it's another good start, I guess ;)

Heh.

Because lawyers are like the sewers of society. See, they provide a useful service by helping society's shits (criminals) on their way to the sewage treatment plants (the judicial system), and if we didn't have lawyers, our streets would be completely full of shit. But not everybody understands that. They just think lawyers stink and see them as a convenient scapegoat whenever the system breaks down and a total shitstorm erupts.

I've never been so proud and offended in a single post. ;)

I think lawyers are not helping crimanals into the jail systems. tirds/criminals don't want to pay to go to jail/treatment plant. Tirds are paying lawyers to assist them from sewers up and out the over flow relief gully into the streets.

lmfao   :D

But what if they're actually innocent? What if they're insane? What if their actions were somehow justified? It's not the lawyer's place to make such judgements. That's for the courts (treatment plants) to decide. A sewer conveys shit and water equally. It's up to the treatment plant to separate the two.

I have nothing against lawyers. Without lawyers the governments would be able to accuse anyone of anything and it would be gospel. lawyers show the flaws in the gospel.
sometimes good outcomes and sometimes bad but that's the nature of the beast.

Patent trolling is honestly so disgusting. Absolutely kills creativity and limits innovation. In this case though I doubt this will go very far as it doesn't really deeply relate to bitcoin.

The mentioned patent has nothing to do with BitCoin or any related system.

It describes a centralized issuing authority and verification is done through this authority (with parts of its database being mirrored to smaller, local sub-authorities for performance reasons).

I recognize that not all lawyers are "evil," and most are just doing what they can in a broken system, but even so, look at the Terms and Conditions to play a game on an Xbox or download a song from iTunes and you should understand why people dislike lawyers. I have agreed to hundreds of contracts over the past year, and yet I have not even read most of them, I have to do that in order to exist in today's society.

Not only that, but a member of my family was sued because a drunk illegal immigrant crashed an airplane his business had worked on. He of course settled out of court losing thousands of dollars because his insurance didn't want to risk it.

I am actually somewhat pro-lawyer, but even so, I get knots in my chest thinking about the harm caused by the profession.

+1

I keep waiting for someone to add. "It's the next one we should worry about" or "What time does the patent office open?" but nobody has yet so I'll add it now.     :)

Insightful. However:

• Wouldn't Satoshi's whitepaper (dated 2009?) be blatant prior art if any entity were to try to patent Bitcoin?
• Wouldn't only the US be affected (you know, like "we shoot ourselves in the foot because we allow the rest of the world to innovate 20 years ahead of our artificial intellectual property locks")? Does the rest of the world enforce or even allow for software patents to be registered? I thought not.

It's not even the patent troll thing, but I have yet to see a software patent that helped innovation in any way (oh yes, true, CompuServe's GIF was more or less killed by PNG because of the patent issue, but I would take it as a reverse example...)

OTOH, I see the victory of CSIRO getting their royalties for Wi-Fi as a "more or less good thing", so I'm not totally opposed to patents in general, when they actually serve as an incentive for innovation (although anything wireless is now patent encumbered and that kind of sucks too)

Under the Crypto Currency Constitution the CCCB declares the following patent Invalid

http://www.google.com/patents/US20130054471

Bit Currency: Transactional Trust Tools
US 20130054471 A1

Publication number   US20130054471 A1
Publication type   Application
Application number   13/529,399
Publication date   Feb 28, 2013
Filing date   Jun 21, 2012
Priority date
   Apr 19, 2007
Also published as   
US8229859
US20080262969
Inventors   
Gideon Samid
Original Assignee   
Gideon Samid
U.S. Classification   
705/69
International Classification   
G06Q20/38
G06Q20/30
Cooperative Classification   
G06Q20/10

Maybe maybe not, he's not tried to do anything against you or us or anyone at this time, right?  Could be just some guy that thought he'd came up with a good idea and patented it.

Yeah, of course Satoki is prior art - and there is much other prior art, too.

But the patent troll is defined by his actions, not his alleged intellectual property.

Perhaps we should patent the bitcoin system ourselves and lic. it under a GPL/MIT or whatever lic. or do we already have this?

@MSantori, from a legal perspective, what is your take on this?

I am, regrettably, not a patent attorney.  I can assist with many different aspects of a start-up's legal requirements, but patent is not one of them.  I get patent questions all the time, and I feel like I need to turn in my geek card when I can't answer them.