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Google gets patent on floating data centers
- owinebarger 17y agoIf they don't pay taxes, wouldn't they be subject to (real) pirates?
- vaksel 17y agoalso target for submarines sponsored by Microsoft live search
- Zaak 17y agoThat's what the ninjas are for.
- defen 17y agoI wouldn't expect these structures to remain tax-free for long. > 1. In the exclusive economic zone, the coastal State shall have the exclusive right to construct and to authorize and regulate the construction, operation and use of: > (a) artificial islands; > (b) installations and structures for the purposes provided for in article 56 and other economic purposes; > (c) installations and structures which may interfere with the exercise of the rights of the coastal State in the zone. from Article 60 http://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/part5.htm http://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/uncl...
- datums 17y agoI would love to see some diagrams of the design.
- pj 17y agogoogle it, there are plenty.
- pj 17y agoIt used to be, you actually had to build something to get a patent on it. Now you can just imagine it.
- mixmax 17y agoBroadly speaking there are three criteria you have to fulfill to get a patent. They are: - It has to be novel, meaning that the invention must never before have been published - It has to be usable, meaning that it has to provide some useful function - It has to be non-obvious to an expert in the field. I don't think this has changed.
- pj 17y agoI am not talking about the laws or the words, I'm talking about how people in the patent office behaved. In the past, if you wanted a patent for a device, you had to be able to show that what you are describing in the patent actually would work, that you'd actually created something that implemented the idea in the patent. That is no longer the case. Now you can simply describe something on paper and get a patent, even if the description in the paper isn't sufficient to implement the invention by others. The whole point, the idea, the impetus behind patents (as a concept) is that you are sharing your repeatable design with the world so they to can replicate your invention in /their/ lab and build upon it. The point was to make the world a better place for everyone by releasing ideas in the the world with a mechanism that can protect them and enable the risk taker to reap the rewards of the risk without the fear that someone will simply steal the idea and make a bunch of money off it and leave you in the dust. This philosophy has been lost and patents have morphed into a corporate strategy that makes the world worse for everyone except the patent holder. The content of the patent has no value. You can have the best idea, with a device, with a demonstrable instance of the idea and it doesn't matter because it still costs millions of dollars to defend in court. Decades ago, patents had value, now they have none. They describe processes that won't work. They are vague enough to cover, not only the invention, but anything even remotely /like/ the invention even if the invention as described in the patent would never work. Patents used to be tools of inventors and now they are tools of lawyers. So yeah, the lingo hasn't changed, but the practice has. It's the practice that I'm talking about. The Bill of Rights hasn't changed in hundreds of years, but today, the press is put in jail, the govt listens to your calls and reads your emails... Kinda sad really...
- lsb 17y agoThere's the piracy, and there's also the question of replacing components. The costs of replacing machines on a boat are very different from on level ground that trucks can drive to.
- ivankirigin 17y agoPatents outside national jurisdictions? That's funny.