Books Lying Open
• Patricia Cornwall, Portrait of a Killer

It was still tasty though, and I did not have the energy to make any real food, so thank god for take out. Inhaled that, and hopped into the shower, where I nodded off three times while sitting and letting the water beat on my back.  Fortunately I did not drown, or fall asleep only to jerk awake hours later, sitting in cold water (which has happened to me a couple of times over the years).

I actually thought about doing some sort of short blog thing, since I had most of the patent bitching essay below already written, but I figured it would just be better if I crashed, what with 26 hours awake at the time, and my getting just 3 or 4 hours of sleep a day for several days before that.  I slept about 7 hours and after a shower and some brekkie, here I am again.

I do think I need to cut back on the blogging a bit.  Not the frequency, 'cause I know you need your daily fix, but the long essay about this or that every day is taking too much time, and I really need to get to spending several hours a day on fiction, if I have any hope of cranking out a publishable novel.

I've been thinking lately about what non fiction thing I could write about.  It's so much easier (for me) to write non fiction, and if all of my readers (including the tens of thousands on the d2 site) were polled (and you know how that hurts) I imagine a solid majority would say they prefer my non-fiction.

Having never really given a thought to writing non-fiction professionally, I spent the last 8 or 9 years planning to be a novelist, even as I was writing less and less fiction.  For a while I thought I'd work in website creation, since I enjoyed doing the D2 site stuff quite a bit, and did a few new sites freelance, mostly for small businesses in the San Diego area.

But I found that work really tedious, which it was.

It's fun to do a website (like this one, or the D2 site) when it's something I want to do, and can cover whatever information or topics I'm interested in.  It's not any fun to work on a design for people who have no creative ideas and don't want a creative website, and who just give you long and boring wordpad documents about their business that they want you to convert into HTML. When the only creative aspect of a fifty page website is figuring out a way to construct the invisible table system so that their plain text and funky point sizes will look online just like they do in the wordpad document... it's pretty bleh.

I also realized that to make any real money doing websites I would have to get some more training in technology.  I can do plain html stuff fine, and I'm good at organizing and having things navigable, though I'm lazy about graphics.  However I don't know any programming and couldn't do a complicated site with ordering options and sales and database it all, which is what business want and need.  And since I hate programming and don't wanna learn it, and find doing other people's sites boring, that seems to pretty well limit my website employment aspirations.  Though I would like to know enough scripting to set up parts of this site in a clever database, as I often say.

As for writing, which I started talking about before I so rudely and typically interrupted myself, I had always assumed I would be a novelist.  Which is not to say that I wouldn't do short stories also, since some ideas are good for a full length story, and others are good for 20 or 30 or 50 pages. But there's no money in short stories, unless you are famous already as a novelist, and can get them in a collection and have your built in audience buy them. It depends on the genre also; horror works very well in short stories, and many famous writers mostly used that form. Lovecraft and Poe, for instance.  In fact there are probably more great horror short stories than novels, and most of the horror novels aren't really "horror".  They're more like adventures with some supernatural elements. ALA Steven King or Dean Koontz.  Fantasy and Sci-Fi work well in short stories also, though they are better known for novels.  It's a lot easier to set a long tale in a different (fantasy or sci-fi) world than it is to write a long tail that's consistently scary/creepy, set in our or any world. However some genres don't work as short stories at all.  You don't see a lot of mystery shorts, or 25 page legal thrillers.

Perhaps needless to say, it's harder to think up a good idea for a 500 page book than one for a 30 page story.  Novels tend to be constructed from one huge central theme, and then the other portions are created along the way, and added on to it.  You need a main theme and plot and a few major characters and some ongoing conflict, and then as you move them along the track of the plot, side plots and minor characters and other such things occur as you write. The hard part is formulating the main characters, their personalities, and the main events in advance, and sticking to it.  You really don't want to get to page 250 and realize the main character should have been much angrier, or much more cautious, and have to go back and tweak their behavior every fifth page, and rewrite several major scenes. And yes, I speak from experience.

Anyway, that's off the topic also. Which was me potentially writing a non-fiction book.  I almost look at present day stories w/o magic or supernatural as "non-fiction".  Obviously the events in your typical John Grisham courtroom thriller didn't actually occur, but they could have.  I mean there's no magic or demons or spirits of the dead, etc.  That sort of novel has never appealed to me to read, which is why I don't really watch any TV shows.  I can see normal people talk and walk around just by leaving my apartment (something I do as seldom as possible), why would I want to read about them for 400 pages, even if they are doing relatively interesting things?  I've always enjoyed horror and fantasy and such more, since it's set in a different world with different rules, one generally a lot more vital and interesting than our real world.

Should I be thinking about writing a novel or story of a type that I don't even read?  Probably not, and yet it doesn't seem like it would be all that hard. 

As for a real non fiction novel, I know even less about that. It seems to me that since you can get non-fiction about virtually any subject you can imagine, for free, on the Internet, that non fiction must be hard to pull off. Plus they have to be about something, which means research, interviews, or something of that nature. If you can write with a compelling voice (which I people seem to think I can) and organize your thoughts and keep it moving and lively and interesting and perhaps even amusing, then readers will be pulled along and enjoy themselves.  But no matter how cleverly you construct your book, it still has to have some sort of backbone of factual information.  And I much prefer to just talk out of my ass and opinionate, as you've probably noticed by now.  I'm excellent at reading a short article, and in the process of talking about it and quoting a bit from it, writing something twice as long a piece as the initial article was.  I don't see how I could turn that into a 400 page book though, unless I can find a 200 page article to comment on?

Anyway, this is going long and I want to get to some other stuff, so here are a few news things and amusing pictures I've been meaning to post the last couple of days and haven't gotten around to yet.

¤ First off, here's a depressing article about the Rosenthal conviction and medical marijuana in general.

The cause of the unexpected death of member Kathy Nicholson, who suffered from paralyzing rheumatoid arthritis, was still being investigated, but Corral said she suspected that Nicholson accidentally overdosed on painkillers she began taking to compensate for the much smaller amount of marijuana she had received over the past several months.

It was Nicholson's death, two days before this week's meeting, that was the talk of the night.

Members -- who did not want their last names published because of their jeopardy under federal law -- were particularly upset because Nicholson's life partner, Tony, a blind WAMM member, would be left to fend for himself. The couple had been inseparable. They had met in the weekly line for the WAMM meeting about four years before, and their common-law union had been celebrated at WAMM's office by scores of members.

As Tony stood before the group, weeping, Corral reminded members to tell him their names as they consoled him, "so Tony knows who's hugging him."

If you can read that last paragraph without getting a speck of sentiment in your eye, or perhaps both eyes, you are indeed one hard mofo. 

And on the lighter side, here are a couple of amusing photo pages.

¤ First off we have "No Bush" and "No War" photos, both featuring dozens of naked women.  How can you go wrong with that?  Especially since neither shot is a close up, and I suspect they aren't all exactly swimsuit models.

¤ Secondly, here's one that tests my resolve to keep semi-objective, and not rage about the stupidity of supernatural/religious belief.  Catholics in Australia have taken to worshiping a fence post.

Most patents filed today are purely for business purposes, to protect something your company might develop at some point, and/or to prevent other companies from making something with the same idea.  You can end up getting a patent on something and just sitting on it, creating nothing yourself but collecting heavy licensing fees from other companies who want to make something similar, and can't due to your roadblock.

The system was never supposed to be so combative. Patents, which last for 20 years, are enshrined in the Constitution as a means of promoting creativity and encouraging progress by rewarding inventors.

For a long time, the scope of patents was sharply limited and easily understood. Ideas and natural phenomena were not patentable. Machines and industrial processes were — provided they were both new and useful.

In 1880, Supreme Court Justice Noah Swayne added a third requirement: A patentable invention, he wrote, should be inspired by "a flash of genius."

This put a high bar on patentability, and through the decades the courts raised it. In 1950, Justice William O. Douglas wrote, "The Constitution never sanctioned the patenting of gadgets. Patents serve a higher end — the advancement of science."

There's an article in the LA Times today that talks about this issue, (which is where the above quote came from) and the steady downward slide of quality control for patents.  It's not really a very interesting article, mostly talking about two companies battling for the right to sell crustless PB&J sammiches.  However part two of the article is what I wanna read.

Next: Patent holders battle for control of the Internet.

And since I wrote this Friday but didn't post it, I might as well just add to it, since part two of the article went up Saturday.

Part two is largely about Lawrence Lockwood, a businessman who operates essentially as a mafia goomba, only he uses lawyers and a patent rather than a baseball bat and arson to shake down small business owners for protection money.  The man does no computer work of his own, has no business of his own, publishes and creates nothing of his own.  He just happens to have a very dubious patent for something sort of like an online buying/selling system, the time to send off countless "licensing" mails, and the patience and lack of morals or ethics to back it up with lawyers and law suits.

He is a parasite and a scumbag, and a living personification of all that is wrong with the current patent office and legal system in America.  And he's certainly not the only one.

A former CIA technology officer is bringing EBay Inc. to trial this spring, claiming that the hugely successful trading site is infringing an online auction patent he applied for in 1995 -- six months before EBay began.

Charles E. Hill & Associates, a software firm, is suing 18 e-commerce companies, including EBay, alleging that they violated its patents on an "electronic-catalog system" and a "method of updating a remote computer."

Acacia Research Corp. in Newport Beach has filed legal complaints against 27 adult entertainment Web sites, alleging that they violated its patents on "the transmission and receipt of digital audio and/or video content." The company is demanding licenses from mainstream music and movie companies too.

All these lawsuits were predictable, said Jonathan Hangartner, a patent lawyer with Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton in San Diego who represents a group of PanIP defendants.

"Anytime there's a major technological breakthrough, there's a spike in patent litigation," Hangartner said. "It happened with automobiles, telephones, trains. Now it's the Internet's turn."

My opinion on all of this is that it's the fault of the patent office, for vastly extending the concept of patents by issuing them for virtually anything to do with connecting computers.  How many ridiculous patents are there?

"If you're selling online, at the most recent count there are 4,319 patents you could be violating," said David E. Martin, chief executive of M-Cam Inc., an Arlington, Va.-based risk-management firm specializing in patents. "If you also planned to advertise, receive payments for or plan shipments of your goods, you would need to be concerned about approximately 11,000."

The worst part is that most of these spurious lawsuit filing weasels have never won a case or fought in court. The muscle to back up their extortion is purely the legal costs it would take a business to fight them.  Lockwood demands around $5000 for a "lifetime licensing fee", which most companies end up paying just because the legal expenses of battling his patent claims in court would be upwards of $1-2m, and if they win they get nothing.  No punitive damages, no legal fees; they just don't have to pay him his $5k.

And obviously, spending years in court and maybe $2m fighting off a parasite who just wants $5k is not a viable option for most businesses, no matter how annoying or spurious the patent and legal claim behind it are.  Lockwood has a past history as an attempted chiseler and rip off artist. There's very little known about him.  Much of what is known comes from one of his earlier, clumsier attempts to rip off a business with a bullshit patent.

...from depositions in a lawsuit Lockwood filed in the early 1990s against AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, claiming its Sabre reservation system was infringing three patents he had been granted in the early 1980s.

Asked by American's lawyers what he did for a living, Lockwood replied, "I'm currently litigating my patents." For money to eat every day, he added, "I assist my family in leasing office space." He said he had "never, for any length of time, used a personal computer."

The case was dismissed, and significant parts of the patents invalidated. Lockwood called it "a very expensive learning process."

Basically what he learned is to go after small companies for small amounts of money, so it's not worth it to them to fight back.  You take on American Airlines, they bring out the legal muscle and hand you your parent-suing ass. The little guy doesn't usually fight back, since the money makes it insane.  No matter how much you may be annoyed by the bullshit of it all. One guy is trying though.

"It was like a bully promising a little kid, 'I'll protect you if you give me your lunch money,' " he said. "These patents don't apply to our Web site. No person I've talked to seems to even think it's a possibility."

The Beeres set up a Web site, first called PANIPdefendants.net and then Youmaybenext.com, which offered information about PanIP's lawsuit and solicited donations. Lockwood's response was to sue the Beeres again, this time for trademark infringement and defamation.

My suggestion would be to invalidate about a million existing internet patents, or possibly to create a new interpretation of the laws, so that the patents only granted the right to sue or demand licensing fees if the patent infringer was using it as the key element of their business, or has stolen the technology from your product. Of course how that would be determined would still require all the same lawyers, etc.

The initial idea for patents, as part one said, was to protect a major breakthrough, an entire new device, a stroke of genius.  Something that business competitors would rip off and use against you, if they could.   These various internet business patents are nothing of the kind, and are mostly for vague ideas and concepts that pretty much anyone setting up any sort of online sales site will have to use.  It's like patenting the idea of storing all the frozen food in the same area of the supermarket, instead of having a display of pizzas in one corner, ice cream in another, frozen peas in a third.  Putting them all together is just common sense in organization, but imagine some prick had a patent on it, and wrote every small grocery in the country demanding $10k in licensing fees, or else they'd have to rip apart their store and put it back together in an insane design.

I doubt anything major is going to happen, though there are some reformers working in the patent offices now.  The only way momentum will come to have a review of patents and how they are offered is when enough major companies get sick of the gnats with lawsuits buzzing around them, and put some heavy pressure on their congressmen and senators to look into the process.  All the small businesses in the world don't have the same clout that a few biggies do, with their millions in campaign contributions.

Which would be another system most of us would love to see dismantled. But that's a topic for another day.

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