We'd Love To Connect You To 911, But It's Patented
from the your-expected-wait-time-is... dept
A company announced today that it's been granted a patent covering some aspect of E911 calls from GSM mobile phones, something having to do with locating a caller and relaying that information to the emergency call center. Why should a company be able to patent something with such blatant public-safety implications? The US government has been pushing for mobile operators to implement E911 for some time, and it's been perenially held up by any number of reasons: governmental buffoonery, carrier foot-dragging, less than impressive technology and, of course, the all-time favorite, local governments not preparing their 911 call centers to support E911, but rather spending the money designated for it on ballpoint pens, winter boots and dry cleaning bills Signs point that the December 31 deadline for it to be implemented will fly right by unheeded as well. So if the government is really serious about getting E911 implemented and/or saving lives -- something of which there's been little indication over the past several years -- it would be removing barriers to its adoption, not letting companies raise new barriers by patenting technology needed for it.
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I'm not seeing the problem...
If a patent holder damages the public by failing to provide the product for sale or forbids licensing to others, then you have a case for compulsory licensing.
What company would ever create a novel product for a specific purpose and not patent it?
Of course, everything I have said assumes this is truly a 'product' patent. If there is some language in that patent that grants protection to a large class of methods, then I would agree with your original post.
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Maybe it's only in California?
But yeah, maybe Californians are making themselves upset over "government inefficiency" or whatever, so they deprive the government of funds and make it more inefficient.
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Patents have gotten out of hand...
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No Subject Given
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Re: No Subject Given
A rather hand-waving claim.
But if you want to claim that the manner the patent office is granting patents "what makes this country work", you go right ahead and think that.
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A deeper read
The patent basically says that the software in the tower will HOLD the call, and not connect to the 911 center, until it is able to identify the exact location of the caller. When it has this information, it transfers the call to the appropriate 911 center. If some (small) preset time elapses and the location information is unavailable, then the call is transfered to the default center.
This does seem like something of a departure from the standard "connect that 911 call as fast as possible" methodology. I don't know, however, if it is truly a non-obvious invention.
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