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Another Garbage Patent
*no comment* writes "Literally "garbage patent" that is, Apple was rewarded a patent for the "Garbage" icon in Mac OS X. The patent documents can be found at the USPTO by clicking here. More on this and other Apple patents are in this article over at the macobserver."
Design patents aren't that big of a deal. If I designed a toaster, I'd get a design patent on *my* toaster so nobody else can call it their own. And no, I can't collect royalties or sue everyone that makes toast. It's different from a trademark, but IANAL so I'm not sure of the differences.
Ever see those infomercials where they start off with "our new, innovative, *patented* design..." Well, odds are they've got a design patent.
After reading the article, I got the impression that they were only doing this so that later, some idiot who convinced the USPTO to give them a similar patent could not sue them. Look at all the ridicilous patents and the inevitable lawsuits. Hey, I would also patents as much as I could to future proof myself agains frivalous lawsuits.
just my 2 cents.
later,
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
Keep this in mind before flaming anyone.
irb(main):001:0>
...this is a Design Patent. This means that it offers protection to a very specific, usually decorative design. There are no text claims, just drawings. Design patents are often used for things like cellphone cases, as each manufacturer tries to lock up distinctive visual fefatures to differentiate otherwise similar items. They are also found in the food industry -- novelty shapes for pasta and breakfast cereal are often protected this way. So, realistically, this is not some huge, evil attempt to patent the very idea of a garbage can icon.
As I loaded the front page and saw the Apple patent (patents are bad, remember?) there was a plain-text ad at the top that linked to:
c omd ex.h tme q_se arch.asp
http://www.invention.com
http://www.litmanlaw.
http://www.gilmanresearch.com/pages/944483/in
http://www.isc-online.com/forms/inventorinfor
http://www.qualitypatent.com
How low can you go!
Furthermore, if you really want to piss & moan about how everyone would jump on MS for doing something this underhanded then you may want to check this one out: Utility (not Design) patent 5,757,371 Taskbar with start menu from (you guessed it) MS.
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
The Icon itself has Copyright to protect it (-Diety- knows that Apple sure protects their little widgets and pictures fervently).
The Patent on the concept of the "Trash Can" in an O.S. is what is ridiculous.
The USPTO defines "design patents" here.
For ADHD slashdotters:
A design consists of the visual ornamental characteristics embodied in, or applied to, an article of manufacture...
In general terms, a "utility patent" protects the way an article is used and works (35 U.S.C. 101), while a "design patent" protects the way an article looks (35 U.S.C. 171)...
Clearly a design that simulates a well-known or naturally occurring object or person is not original as required by the statute. Furthermore, subject matter that could be considered offensive to any race, religion, sex, ethnic group, or nationality is not proper subject matter for a design patent application (35 U.S.C. 171 and 37 CFR 1.3).
According to the PTO web site:
So, it doesn't cover any functionality. In fact, if the design relates closely to functionaly, then that weakens the patent. In this case, I'd say the design of the garbage can icon pretty precisely relates to the functionalty of throwing away files.
With this in mind, it seems that it's probably a pretty toothless patent. Don't lose any sleep over it.
They already have...5,757,371 Taskbar with start menu
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
Just wait until the Apple fans come out of the woodwork...
Seems like everybody's getting patents these days...
Don't save your orgasms for Heaven; Heaven knows we need them here.
I don't see a single post defending this obviously frivolous patent, or Apple for filing it
Oh, for crying out loud..
It's a design patent, not a utility patent. Go learn the difference before you call it frivolous.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It would be SO easy....
You mean it was counter-intuitive to select the disk and go to the menu marked "File" and use the "Eject" item (key combo: apple-E)? You could also have used the "Put Away" (key combo: apple-Y) item in the "Special" menu . Later on when contextual menus were available you could control-click on the disk and hit the "Eject Disk" item.
Dragging the disk to the trash was just one of several ways to eject a disk. Some may have been more intuitive than others but the quickest way was to drag it to the trash. Think of it as a power user shortcut, not the default action.
With MacOS X the trash icon becomes a disk eject icon when you start to drag a disk anywhere. When you hover over the eject icon it says Eject. So now you do not drag the disk to the trash, you drag it to the eject.
Sapere aude!
Come on folks. This is a stupid design patent. It isn't a functional patent at all.
See, the patent number starts with a D. It is like a super-copyright for a specific design. Bottles, cars, etc. tend to have design patents on them.
You do that. I'll find a way to get cigarettes and Playboys to you for as many years as they get you for, too...
Methinks you are mistaking civil law for criminal law.
These are patents on ornamental designs. This is fairly typical, and is used to protect how thinks look.
Jewelery, etc, often has ornamental design patents on it.
As for laptop design patents,
"While a design patent may be issued for a utilitarian article, such a patent may be obtained only to the extent that the ornamental features dominate the functional features. To the extent to which a design is predominately utilitarian in nature, it is not protectable by a design patent in the United States. "
The only thing the patents prevent you from doing is making something that looks exactly like say, a powerbook g4, such that an ordinary observer might purchase the "fake" product thinking it was the patented product.
I wouldn't worry much about it, since the only protectable parts are the parts of say, the trash icon, not found in the prior art.
You're basically talking about a utility patent, which is indeed the dominant kind. This is a design patent, there's a difference.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
With Mac OS X, the trash can icon changes to an eject icon when you drag a volume over it. So you aren't actually dropping the floppy into the trash. Also, the shortcut for 'send to trash' is not the same as the shortcut for 'eject'. So while this might have been confusing in Mac OS 9 and under, in Mac OS X this confusion is not there. And even in Pre OS X systems, there was an option to eject floppies in one of the menus (special?), also I think with the shortcut cmd-E.
No kidding, every time I try to get rid of my microsoft junk, it just comes right back...
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
OK, does anyone remember when Apple came out with the garbage can? I'll give you a hint: It was part of the whole package which signalled an entirely new era in computing.
That's significant. A new era! The beginning of something other than EVERYTHING that had proceeded it. (Yeah, Xerox notwithstanding. That's another story.) The garbage can WAS a completely different, new, and innovative idea.
Do they deserve a patent for it? Hmm. Tough call. Would I be as fair to Microsoft if they'd invented it? Tougher call--I've tried to be fair to MS when they do something creative or right, but it's been such a rare event that I can't promise unbiased commentary.
But as long as a general patent like this is legally valid, I'd say that this specific patent is valid. At the time, it was creative enough to change computing, and that's impressive.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Utility patents are for useful inventions. Machines that do things, methods for doing things, etc.
Copyrights are for original artistic works. BUT with regards to pictoral, sculptural, or graphic works, they must be non-functional.
Trademarks are for designs that indicate the source of a good or service used in commerce. Since the Trash isn't being used to identify products in commerce, it wouldn't qualify. The Apple logo would, OTOH.
Thus, a typeface is not copyrightable, because the letter shapes are arguably not sufficiently original, and are certainly graphic and functional, said function being to convey to people a particular letter.
Design patents apply to how things look, as opposed to how they function. There's some additional requirements (one relevant here being that the design might not be original enough)
Thus a typeface could receive a design patent, and basically they exist to fill in that gap in copyrights.
Of course, if you had a Banana Jr. computer that closely resembled the original Macintoshes, and Apple had a design patent on the case, then a design patent could serve a similar role to trademarks.
Note also that the types of protection that the various approaches convey can be significantly different.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
After the Mac had it's trash can, NeXT had it's recycler (in the dock). So actually no, Microsoft did not take Apple's trash can and make it a recycle bin. Jobs's company NeXT did that long before Microsoft did.
For those who don't know, Mac OS X is essentially NextStep with a lot of the Apple stuff hacked into it.
Anyway.. as far as the patent goes, it seems it is just on that very specific design of a trash can which I do not have a problem with. Notice that they even cited prior art because the claim doesn't seem to be that they are the first trash can, the claim seems to be that they are the first trashcan with this particular design.
Originally, the ability to eject disks by trashing them was a "hack" only intended for use internally. The UI designers did decide that it didn't make any sense and that being able to trash a mounted disk to eject it was wrong. So this feature was removed. The resulting annoyance of people who had gotten used to trashing disks to unmount them resulted in this feature getting put back in.
You could very easily get by using floppies without ever knowing that you could eject by trashing, however. As others have mentioned, "Eject Disk" (Command-E) was under the Special menu. "Put Away" (Command-Y) also worked, although the idea there is that something should be put back to where it came from. Usually you used "Put Away" for files.
Strangely they reference Windows 3.1 and OS/2 in their patent....
quoting..
"""
Other References
"Microsoft Windows 3.1 Users Guide;" Microsoft Corporation; pp. 3, 10, 13, 14, 20, 22, 48, 215 and 221; 1992.
Moscowitz et al.; "OS/2 2.1 Unleashed;" pp. 152-157, 193 and 222-229; 1993.
Corel Gallery Clipart Catalog, Corel Corp., photos of people, pp. C19-C20, 1995.
"""
wonder why???
Public Domain can mean openly available to everyone and not subject to copyright protection, or simply openly available to the public (i.e. for sale to the public).
You know, if every fuckwit in the world makes up definitions for commonly available words, english will get more fucked up than it already is.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Because according to a thread on the GNOME desktop-devel-list, they already have one!
Some reasons software patents are evil are:
- regular patents protect one specific thing, software patents protect one tiny piece of a large puzzel. So a single program most of the time infringes on a large number of patents, making licensing not feasible (if you have to pay 5% of your revenue for every patent you use, you'll probably have to pay for each copy you sell).
- they don't protect small-time developers at all (except maybe against other small-time developers). If you find out that IBM or Microsoft violates your patent and you demand some retribution for that, they'll have a look at your program and probably find that you violate 30 patents of theirs. Of course, because they are such nice guys, they will probably allow you to keep using their patented stuff if they can use your 1 patent. So the protection you get is zero, and if they're not nice guy's you'll have to pay extra. The advantage of a small software developer is the speed at which he can follow changes of the market and do things, compared to the big, slow megacorporations.
- Programming not very unlike composing a symphony: just like you can't just take a couple of "musical techniques", throw them together and get something that sounds good, you can't take just a couple of (patented) cool software techniques, throw them together and get a killer app. It's the way you make those things work/sound together, the hours of debugging/refining that makes/breaks the result.
- Software patents are granted for the most stupid things, for tthe simple reason that if you take something already existing that is completely obvious, but do it in software, it is considered new (e.g. selling stuff in a store -> selling stuff via the Internet, keeping client records in a store -> keeping client records in an internet store,
...)
- there are so many software patents that pretty much every program in existence probably violates several patents. If you want to develop a program, sell it and make sure you don't violate any patent, you'll probably spend more time on lawyers to look at all available software patents than you'll ever make selling your program.
The bottom line is that software patents do not promote progress and inventions (which is the original goal of the patent system), but in fact retard it (since you should be scared to do something, knowing that you're probably violating at least one patent or another and that when someone who has such a patent finds you annoying enough, he'll either sue you to hell or force you to give him all "intellectual property" you got). See also this article.In the same spirit: Beethoven is considered a great composer that was very progressive for his time, i.e. he introduced a lot of "new" things in his music. Nevertheless, should there have been music patents in his time, he would have been unable to make any of his compositions, since although he was smart, he wasn't smart/good enough to reinvent the music from zero and still get something that sounds good. It's similar in software development: you may be a superprogrammer with great ideas, but no one is that good that he can reinvent software development from scratch. You're just bound to reuse ideas that others have had before (and lots of people have the same ideas at the same time, without knowing anything about eachother).
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