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No, if you look at the Search report it says that all claims are not New, so not patentable, in view of an article by Duda.

https://worldwide.espacenet.co...

Your prejudice shows. ....

The Wikipedia article about car insurers using OBD-II data lists a few:

• Motor vehicle monitoring system for determining a cost of insurance (US5797134; EP0877992), assigned to Progressive
• Individual evaluation system for motorcar risk (EP0700009), held by its Spanish inventor
• VEHICULAR INSURANCE BILL CALCULATING SYSTEM, ON-VEHICLE DEVICE, AND SERVER DEVICE (application JP2002259708), assigned to Toyota and Sony
• INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION DEVICE, INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION PROGRAM, INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION METHOD, AND INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION SYSTEM (application WO2005083605), assigned to AIOI

The Wikipedia article about car insurers using OBD-II data lists a few:

• Motor vehicle monitoring system for determining a cost of insurance (US5797134; EP0877992), assigned to Progressive
• Individual evaluation system for motorcar risk (EP0700009), held by its Spanish inventor
• VEHICULAR INSURANCE BILL CALCULATING SYSTEM, ON-VEHICLE DEVICE, AND SERVER DEVICE (application JP2002259708), assigned to Toyota and Sony
• INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION DEVICE, INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION PROGRAM, INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION METHOD, AND INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION SYSTEM (application WO2005083605), assigned to AIOI

The Wikipedia article about car insurers using OBD-II data lists a few:

• Motor vehicle monitoring system for determining a cost of insurance (US5797134; EP0877992), assigned to Progressive
• Individual evaluation system for motorcar risk (EP0700009), held by its Spanish inventor
• VEHICULAR INSURANCE BILL CALCULATING SYSTEM, ON-VEHICLE DEVICE, AND SERVER DEVICE (application JP2002259708), assigned to Toyota and Sony
• INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION DEVICE, INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION PROGRAM, INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION METHOD, AND INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION SYSTEM (application WO2005083605), assigned to AIOI

The Wikipedia article about car insurers using OBD-II data lists a few:

• Motor vehicle monitoring system for determining a cost of insurance (US5797134; EP0877992), assigned to Progressive
• Individual evaluation system for motorcar risk (EP0700009), held by its Spanish inventor
• VEHICULAR INSURANCE BILL CALCULATING SYSTEM, ON-VEHICLE DEVICE, AND SERVER DEVICE (application JP2002259708), assigned to Toyota and Sony
• INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION DEVICE, INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION PROGRAM, INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION METHOD, AND INSURANCE FEE CALCULATION SYSTEM (application WO2005083605), assigned to AIOI

http://worldwide.espacenet.com...
As usual this topic gets its history wrong, the first transistor was in the 1920s

True, but there were many touchscreen phones before iPhones and none had the "obvious" slide to unlock feature.

Weirdly enough, slide-to-unlock was patented in Europe five years before Apple decided to "invent" it.

Europe: http://worldwide.espacenet.com...

Apple: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi...

Prior Patent by Apple fucking mentioned in the other Apple patent. Oh BTW, learn the fucking difference between filing date and granting date. 5 years before my ass.

True, but there were many touchscreen phones before iPhones and none had the "obvious" slide to unlock feature.

Weirdly enough, slide-to-unlock was patented in Europe five years before Apple decided to "invent" it.

Europe: http://worldwide.espacenet.com...

Apple: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi...

The one patent I was aware of was a patent Atari snuck through by designing a circuit that XOR'ed a bit pattern to change the color a TV was displaying to avoid burn in.

Really! I didn't know of that one -- cute. The earliest one I know of is the SUID patent with circuit diagram that Richie (of K and R fame) did.

The application was a video conferencing system. The omnidirectional camera had the exact same arrangement of mirrors and black baffles between them. It was placed in the middle of a conference table and the display was steered automatically by a microphone array that determined the direction of the speaker. This way you always got a nice framing of the speaker's head. It was essential for getting any kind of usable picture in a conference with multiple people back when bandwidth was limited and video compression was crappy. It would still be very useful today but I haven't seen this anywhere.

http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?FT=D&CC=WO&NR=9847291A3

A lot of "antivaxxer" dolts trumpet Wakefield in that he's a victim of a hush-up and that he shall be exonerated. A good stick in the eye of these people is that Wakefield himself only sought to discredit MMR so that he could sell his own vaccine, they assume that he is anti-vaccine altogether like them. There are articles stating this but the patent iteself is difficult to find so they ignore that. Of course, once you present the actual patent material they will go on to disown him and yet in the same fell swoop continue using his "evidence". Sometimes you can't win...

For your convenience, here is one of Wakefield's actual patents

http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=EP&NR=1304891 has european patent text but you can only link to the abstract of the patent because they use some bullshit session system.

Also based on the claims of that patent (the automatic packet fragmentation patent) it looks like now that ON THE INTERNET is a done thing, ON THE CELLULAR NETWORK is the new hotness for taking things everyone already does and patenting them all over again.

Actually yes, it does. You can patent the *specific* hardware implementation of a task. Someone else could then do the exact same task with a different implementation and bypass your patent.

For example, Setuid was patented by Dennis Ritchie in 1972/1979 (applied/granted) based on the hardware implementation, as shown in the patent abstract.

Now what am I supposed to do?

Are you wearing a bra on your head?

Now, why would I do that?

I was thinking of Weird Science where they create the perfect woman by feeding pictures to their home computer.
( Movie Clip)

Now what am I supposed to do?

Are you wearing a bra on your head?

Now, why would I do that?

How do you search for european patents?

I wondered about that, too. I don't get any EP results, even if I search for an EP number. For example the patents listed on some Espacenet query, do not return any results on google.

Cool. As "Do no evil" Google provides customized search results (like Fox telling people only what they want to hear), they surely could provide Apple or the Patent office with search results that don't include prior art to Google's patents. Quite convenient. Hypothetically.

More seriously, as a patent attorney I already find Google's search facility very worthwhile, as it allows me to do an advance search before a particular date (the priority date or the filing date, to be more specific). This did result in finding prior art that is currently used in opposition proceedings to have a patent revoked. The system works (it is not copyright).

Bert
Patent law: Making inventions open source long before the term was coined.
http://worldwide.espacenet.com/?locale=en_EP

> However, in the case of software patents, the inventor discloses nothing, hides the source code, and keeps the binary protected by copyright. So the deal is completely one-sided. That is what's wrong with software patents.

If that were true, software patents could be invalidated by any competent patent lawyer because they simply do not satisfy the statutory requirement for disclosure of the best known means of practicing the invention.

Boy, wouldn't that be nice. Can I join you in your fantasy land?

One Click

I see no source code, data structures, implementation details.. All I see is a garbled executive "flow chart" and a dozen claims covering every interface imaginable. If you create a system that interprets the solitary sound of someone farting in your general direction as a sale, then you're infringing.

Or this one.

To the contrary. The purpose of patents is to spread information, which is what we as a society get in return for a temporary monopoly as a reward for the inventor. For an all you can eat link on any (technical ) subject go here: http://worldwide.espacenet.com/

Please note that what you can find on this site is patent applications. They are (or will) not necessarily granted. If the patent is granted but not for your country, is expired or the owner stopped paying renewal fees and the patent lapsed, you can use this info free of charge!

Bert

EP 0618540, Microsoft's obscene "MSDOS-compatible filenames" patent on FAT32, was upheld by a German court.

Whisson Windmill at least as old as 2007. Also, patented.

It's not about push e-mail but about status synchronization between multiple devices. See page 13 of the patent.

The patent in question is EP 1010336 (B1) (aka US patent 6,359,898 - it is more often referenced via its EP number because the court cases have happened mostly in Europe so far).

And here is Motorola's ETSI IPR declaration of this patent as "essential" for GPRS - the link at the bottom is to the PDF of the declaration form. It lists the patent in question among several others, and has the following verbiage at the beginning:

It is my belief that the IPRs listed in Annex 2 are, or are likely to become, Essential IPRs in relation to that Standard [GRPS].

The signatory and/or its affiliates hereby declare that they are prepared to grant irrevocable licenses under the IPRs on terms and conditions which are in accordance with Clause 6.1 of the ETSI IPR policy, in respect of the standard, to the extent that the IPRs remain essential.

Finally, here is the ETSI IPR policy:

6.1 When an ESSENTIAL IPR relating to a particular STANDARD or TECHNICAL SPECIFICATION is brought to the attention of ETSI, the Director-General of ETSI shall immediately request the Page 35 ETSI Rules of Procedure, 30 November 2011 owner to give within three months an irrevocable undertaking in writing that it is prepared to grant irrevocable licences on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions under such IPR to at least the following extent:

- MANUFACTURE, including the right to make or have made customized components and sub-systems to the licensee's own design for use in MANUFACTURE;
- sell, lease, or otherwise dispose of EQUIPMENT so MANUFACTURED;
- repair, use, or operate EQUIPMENT; and
- use METHODS.

The above undertaking may be made subject to the condition that those who seek licences agree to reciprocate.

In the event a MEMBER assigns or transfers ownership of an ESSENTIAL IPR that it disclosed to ETSI, the MEMBER shall exercise reasonable efforts to notify the assignee or transferee of any undertaking it has made to ETSI pursuant to Clause 6 with regard to that ESSENTIAL IPR.

It would be nice if people stopped conflating the two.
Copyright: World wide by default
Patents: Only valid where it is applied for (IF granted) . In view of the cost, most patents are only applied for in 1 country/jurisdiction.

Copyright: No cost to the copyright holder
Patents: Applicant must draft costly patent application

Copyright: Never ends in your lifetime or that of your children
Patents: End when the proprietor stops paying the renewal fee and in any case within 20 years.

Copyright: Even for DRM where the work will never enter the public domain
Patents: The applications are publicly available (for the treasure trove on just about any topic, see for exampole http://espacenet.com/ for everyone world wide (including developing countries).

Copyright: Has to be original (low bar)
Patents: Must not only be New, but also Inventive (very high bar; sure, some bad stuff slips through but there are review process/opposition procedures to weed them out if someone is bothered by one). The invention must be described in a way in which an ordinary person skilled in the art can work it (or the patent is null and void).

So, while the patent law is crude, it is working. You don't think that applicants would provide the long explanatory texts that patent applications are if they had no chance of getting protection for their invention, do you?
Copyright law, I agree with you: No balance between society and copyright holder. And the balance is shifting in the wrong direction too. If you conflate the two, you make it harder to get something done about copyright law.

Bert

If this is the same system as I remember reading about before it was setup by a Brit entrepreneur with GNURadio:
  http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/153689

It sounds like a very inspiring story for geeks & radio enthusiast entrepreneurs.

His software is of course, closed source so I can't say much more than that.I can't find the website now. I think he focusses on shopping malls but it can work anywhere and if you got the cash he'd probably do that for you.

The bit I don't understand is how he communicates the movement to the customer. In my mind I imagined a full map but it could be more simple; just indicating which shop is closest.

I think the company is called Path Intelligence?
http://groups.google.com/group/london-hack-space/browse_thread/thread/564ac80ec04b8b3f
http://www.pathintelligence.com/en/products/footpath/footpath-technology

The patent:
http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=EP&NR=1779133&KC=&FT=E&locale=en_EP

  -j

a) Patent laws are not designed to do kill innovation. They're designed to spread information and give an incentive not to hide the knowledge. Wanna dig up all kind of info that doesn't come in a manual with your phone or car, to mention just two of a gazillion topics? Dig in the patent literature, e.g. here: http://worldwide.espacenet.com/
Applicants pay lots of money to have the invention properly written down, such that the ordinary person skilled in that particular art can work the invention.
b) You reply to the quote. Now, either prove your point and dig up the patent for the temperature controlled hot plate or come to the realization that your reply is not a proper conclusion. Look here: http://worldwide.espacenet.com/

Bert
BTW, what you find in the database, is patent applications, which were not necessarily granted or granted as broad as originally filed for.

a) Patent laws are not designed to do kill innovation. They're designed to spread information and give an incentive not to hide the knowledge. Wanna dig up all kind of info that doesn't come in a manual with your phone or car, to mention just two of a gazillion topics? Dig in the patent literature, e.g. here: http://worldwide.espacenet.com/
Applicants pay lots of money to have the invention properly written down, such that the ordinary person skilled in that particular art can work the invention.
b) You reply to the quote. Now, either prove your point and dig up the patent for the temperature controlled hot plate or come to the realization that your reply is not a proper conclusion. Look here: http://worldwide.espacenet.com/

Bert
BTW, what you find in the database, is patent applications, which were not necessarily granted or granted as broad as originally filed for.

So tell me Mr. Jobs are you some kind of a god? where you should be able to shamelessly take others concepts as your own but others should not? Or is it that you are just a super hypocrite?

Mr Jobs, is this what your company is attempting to do with other people's code through the use of blatant software-patents? and other dubious software-patents?

So using software patents to gain control of code that you or your company did not write is cool?

Untrue. Yes, the claims in the document everyone keeps linking to and discussing are rubbish and should never be granted - indeed they weren't as that's merely the published application. If you look at the claims of the granted patent specification (and not the published application which everyone keeps linking to) http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/originalDocument?FT=D&date=20100929&DB=&locale=en_EP&CC=EP&NR=2059868B1&KC=B1 which actually define the scope of protection offered by the patent, you will see 2 independent claims. One is directed towards a method and is phrased in terms of method steps i.e. a series of actions to perform to obtain a desired event or result. The other is an apparatus claim, claiming the device that carries out the method of claim 1.

The method is "computer implemented" sure, but it's not software. Each step has a technical nature "do this, do that, wait for this to occur and then do something etc".

The claims don't claim software as such, they claim a method that can be carried out by software. It is, however the method itself which is granted (rightly or wrongly, I don't know, I don't work in this field) because that combination of method steps is, in the opinion of the examining division, new and inventive. The additional "feature" of it being computer implemented or "in software" is not inventive under the guidelines of the EPC and will have been treated as such.

Who knows, the patent seems to have some 40 claims to cover waving a fucking finger.

My dutch is very limited to sinaasappelsap but I believe this is the ruling:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/62981838/KG-11-0730-en-11-731-Apple-Samsung
Maybe some dutch person can translate the it?

This is supposed to be the patent (in english):
http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/description?CC=EP&NR=2059868A2&KC=A2&FT=D&date=20090520&DB=&locale=en_EP

What really bothers me is that this is clearly a software patent of the ridiculous kind (How to stroke a touch sensitive device horizontally. There must be prior art...) How could this be valid in civilized Europe? I thought we had said no to software patents (with a few exceptions) back in 2005 or such.

Out of a dozen patents that should be either invalid or are invalid, the fact that the court recognized one as valid is still a loss, even if it is a small one. This is a victory for Apple, even if they "lost".

http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/description?CC=EP&NR=2059868A2&KC=A2&FT=D&date=20090520&DB=&locale=en_EP

They aren't. It's not a software patent.

Hmm... quacks like a duck...

They aren't. It's not a software patent.

they even filed it at the European Patent Office. it is not perfect and we saw some exceptions but in general the rule no software patents is working and enforced.

why did they try this? it's madness...

it's not possible to patent software (except software related to industrial processes, like computer-assisted production).

The EPO and some of the national POs have a long and dirty history of pretending - for political reasons - that that is the case. I'm horrified if the lie is being repeated in an educational setting. I suggest you contact the French branch of the FFII for clarification, but with a little patience you can quite easily check for yourself just how brazen a lie it is: http://worldwide.espacenet.com/

An interesting approach. Now to protect it from patent trolls, you just need to patent it (and offer free licenses if you want). Posting here does not invalidate patent claims, because your one-paragraph summary is nowhere near precise enough to be considered a working design specification.

Patents cover implementations, not ideas. Patent trolls get patents on implementations that are either unspecific (easily overturned on review) or unavoidable.

For example, the patent on LZW compression affected all GIF-creating programs, because they all followed the exact same algorithm. No other algorithm is known to produce compatible results, so the patent was unavoidable. Had the patent in question simply covered all forms of lossless compression, PNG could never have been created, until a lawsuit had the broad patent overturned.

Patent trolls want unavoidable patents, but they're hard to get. They require actually inventing something useful, so they're expensive. Trolls will also look for broad patents, and hope they can pressure people to license the technology before a lawsuit sets things straight.

The only implementation detail in your comment is the use of BitTorrent, which isn't unavoidable as there are other distributed technologies that would work better in a net-boot environment. Being so broad in itself, a patent troll need only take your idea, add some trivial (but novel) condition, and apply for a patent.

Sorry, but it's just another idea.

Patent of Dyson Sphere is already here.

it is necessary for the convenience of one click shopping

You're being sarcastic, right? Why would a glorified vector engine be useful for doing video compression, which is basically lots and lots of vector math? It's so obvious that anybody with even basic knowledge of video compression would immediately understand how the two problem spaces map onto one another with no instruction whatsoever.

It's so obvious that ATI released software to do it within a year of when that patent was first filed, which means they were working on it at least a year before that, which means that multiple people independently came up with the idea at the same time, which means it is obvious.

Heck, other companies had already been doing this, and even held patents on it five years earlier. Okay, so texture compression and video compression aren't quite the same thing. One deals with a single image, one deals with compressing a series of images.... Yeah, that's not obvious to anyone who has never seen someone make a flipbook during class in elementary school.

2005 wants their news back, http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=US&NR=7255627&KC=&FT=E

BTW, the link will take you to a website where you will be asked if you want to see the patent, and if you click yes, you'll go to a page that lists several patents (along with lots of ads), and if you choose the right link, you might get to see the patent. Good luck.

Though I'm from Austria, I am in now way whatsoever involved with patents, I tried to look "AM 7738/2003" up @ patent search engine, without luck. I just noticed that when I filter for Austrian patents the prefix changes to AT XXXXXXX, so I'm not sure what to make of the AM
fyi...

For the pictures, it looks like the subsonic airplane is equipped with turboprop engines - or are these propfans ? If so, our next generations airliners might very well be equipped with propellers again: Airbus is also considering propfans.

They can be search at http://gb.espacenet.com/search97cgi/s97_cgi.exe?Action=FormGen&Template=gb/en/quick.hts

The patent in Portugal is "METHOD TO TRANSCODE H.264/AVC VIDEO FRAMES INTO MPEG-2 AND DEVICE" and it's in study, so it hasn't been granted yet. I don't know about other countries, but if they count yet to be granted patents as "having them", their list is not really accurate.

Patent keeping the not side hot and the cold side cold.

smart enough to make these idiot companies with closed-source encryption

It's often overlooked that GSM development started in 1982. At that time computing power was a fraction of what it is now and DSPs, rather than dedicated logic used in today's chipsets, would be used for the first implementations of this new technology. Mobile phones are also very power sensitive devices - battery life is very important.

So given these pressures, some corners had to be cut to make the system workable on the available technology. This lead to the A5 algorithms being both proprietary and somewhat lightweight given the limited computing resources in a mobile phone. Due to the huge success of GSM and the number of handsets out there, it rapidly becomes very difficult to change the standard in such a fundamental manner. 3G is one attempt to upgrade the GSM standards and brings in new ciphers based upon an existing published standard, but even that has taken a long time to get traction and GSM is still very widely available.

So to say these companies are idiots is somewhat ignorant of the historical practicalities required to make GSM a success.

what about the fact that software patents are not valid in EU? Cant Khronos just release the spec in EU and screw US?

What makes you assume "software" solutions to technological problems are not patentable in the EU? Have a look at probably any computer related patent (e.g picking the first one from ARM I could find) and I suspect you will find both "apparatus" and "method of" versions of the claims. The latter generally refers to a software-based implementation of the invention.

Now, the issue is whether something is obvious and/or trivial and there are certainly a number of granted US patents which have some outrageous claims that haven't got past the EPO examiners.

I agree, once you have RECEIVED a patent on something you are not REQUIRED to actually implement it.

I have no clue what they actually intend to do with this patent if and when it is granted, but it is entirely possible that the main goal of the patent is to prevent anyone else from implementing ads on their OS and if they do, Apple gets to sue them. It could simply be leverage for future use, I don't know.

A rather famous example of a pre-emptive patent is "Device for Perfusing An Animal Head" which, according to the "inventor" was designed to give him legal ground to slow or stop the process of this type of research unless it was done to a certain standard.

I don't know how successful it was but patents primarily give you legal grounds to sue. That is really all they are.