Copycat produces answers to such problems as “abc is to abd as ijk is to what?” (abc:abd :: ijk:?). Hofstadter and Mitchell consider analogy making as the core of high-level cognition, or high-level perception, as Hofstadter calls it, basic to recognition and categorization. High-level perception emerges from the spreading activity of many independent processes, called codelets, running in parallel, competing or cooperating.
They create and destroy temporary perceptual constructs, probabilistically trying out variations to eventually produce an answer. The codelets rely on an associative network, slipnet, built on pre-programmed concepts and their associations (a long-term memory). The changing activation levels of the concepts make a conceptual overlap with neighboring concepts.
Typically, a party (other than the patentee or licensee of the patentee) that manufactures, imports, uses, sells, or offers for sale patented technology without permission/license from the patentee, during the term of the patent and within the country that issued the patent, is considered to infringe the patent.
To determine if a patent has been infringed, a specific test is used. The test varies from country to country, but in general it requires that the infringing party’s product (or method, service, and so on) falls within one or more of the (independent) claims of the patent. The process employed involves “reading” a claim onto the technology of interest. If all of the claim’s elements are found in the technology, the claim is said to “read on” the technology;
If a single element from the claim is missing from the technology, the claim does not literally read on the technology and the technology generally does not infringe the patent with respect to that claim, except if the doctrine of equivalents is considered applicable. In response to allegations of infringement, an accused infringing party typically asserts one or more of the following:
- that it was not practicing the patented invention, i.e. the invention claimed in the patent (the claims define the extent of protection conferred by a patent);
- that it was not performing any infringing act in the territory covered by the patent (patents are indeed territorial in nature);
- that the patent has expired (since patents have a limited patent term, i.e. a limited lifetime);
- that the patent (or the particular claim(s) alleged to be infringed) is invalid, because the invention in question does not meet the patentability requirements or includes a formal defect, this rendering the patent invalid or unenforceable;
- that it has obtained a license under the patent.
The parties may also resolve their dispute in a settlement, which may involve a licensing agreement, such as a cross-licensing agreement. Private settlements may not always serve the public interest, “because litigating patent disputes to completion tends to generate positive externalities, by clarifying the limits of patent protection if the patent is upheld or encouraging wider use of the innovation if the patent is invalidated”.
In certain jurisdictions, there is a particular case of patent infringement called “indirect infringement.” Indirect infringement can occur, for instance, when a device is claimed in a patent and a third party supplies a product which can only be reasonably used to make the claimed device. Copycat’s architecture is tripartite, consisting of a slipnet, a working area (also called workspace, similar to blackboard systems), and the coderack (with the codelets).
The slipnet is a network composed of nodes, which represent permanent concepts, and weighted links, which are relations, between them. It differs from traditional semantic networks, since the effective weight associated with a particular link may vary through time according to the activation level of specific concepts (nodes). The codelets build structures in the working area and modify activations in the slipnet accordingly (bottom-up processes), and the current state of slipnet determines probabilistically which codelets must be run (top-down influences).
Copycat differs considerably in many respects from other cognitive architectures such as ACT-R, Soar, DUAL, Psi-Theory, or subsumption architectures. Copycat is Hofstadter’s most popular model. Other models presented by Hofstadter et al. are similar in architecture, but different in the so-called microdomain, their application, e.g. Letter Spirit, etc.
Since the 1995 book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies describing the work of the Fluid Analogies Research Group (FARG) book, work on Copycat-like models has continued: as of 2008 the latest models are Phaeaco (a Bongard problem solver), SeqSee (number sequence extrapolation), George (geometric exploration), and Musicat (a melodic expectation model).
The architecture is known as the “FARGitecture” and current implementations use a variety of modern languages including C# and Java. A future FARG goal is to build a single generic FARGitecture software framework to facilitate experimentation.
Patent infringement insurance is an insurance policy provided by one or more insurance companies to protect either an inventor or a third party from the risks of inadvertently infringing a patent. In June 2006, a Study for the European Commission on the feasibility of possible insurance schemes against patent litigation risks was published.
The report concluded that the continuation of the status quo with very little, disproportionately expensive, bespoke patent litigation insurance (PLI) would not meet any objectives for a feasible insurance scheme. Instead, only a mandatory scheme was considered to be viable in order to provide the economic and technical benefits to the EU and individual patentees which would arise from a widespread PLI scheme.
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