Slashdot Mirror
E-Pass Can Resue Patent Case Against Palm
kisrael writes "The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled that a patent held by
E-Pass may have been infringed by Palm and other PDA makers even though their devices are larger than 'credit-card sized.' The 1994 patent describes a 'multifunction, credit card-sized computer that allows users to securely store a multitude of account numbers, PIN codes, access information and other data from multiple credit cards, check cards, identification cards and similar personal documents.'"
Can you say prior art? The HP 95LX ran MS-DOS in 1991, even though it's not credit card sized, according to this judge it would be infringing right?
My journal has hot
Please. The PalmOS is Totally not secure. Just hook it up to a Hotsync port and run debug. :-P
--Jasin Natael
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
Unfortunately, the court only posts its decisions in MS Word format, but if you want to read it, here's the link: E-Pass Technologies v. 3Com, Inc.
Don't read too much into this decision. The court hasn't found that there was infringement, only that the lower court nees to take a closer look at the issue. (In legal terms, the court of appeals overturned a grant of summary judgment by the lower court, meaning that the lower court has to hear additional evidence and/or reconsider its application of law before it can render a final judgment.) This is an interim opinion, but the case is not over yet.
[insert randomly selected declaration of absolutist meta-moderation philosophy here]
like the Xircom rex family, but unfortunately they ar not available anymore afaik. www.rex6000.com : Says something about (maybe) the first credit card sized pda, he bought it 7 years ago, the page was last updated October 2001. I also remember that i had a Casio watch with a phonebook, and it was smaller then a credit card :-) i guess it was 1986 ...
Secure storage? well, is a PIN code enough for this? I guess not ...
Wait, doesn't this mean E-Pass could sue OOCEA for trademark dilution?
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
I can demonstrate prior art on behalf of Texas Instruments in the form of my TI-85, which will store any number or image, and recall it at the touch of a button.
I use Keyring to store most of my passwords. It encrypts all the passwords with 3DES using a key derived from a passphrase I supply.
I expect this makes it secure against snooping on the wire during a hotsync. I think the passphrase would be needed to cause any harm.
Rich
The problem with Slashdot's citing of "prior art" is that no one here knows what "prior art" means, or how to use it effectively.
"Prior art" is just that -- it is "art," that is "prior." What do you think the references listed on the face of most patents are?
"Prior art" by itself does not destroy a patent unless it meets certain conditions. In particular, the art has to predate the filing of the patent application, usually by at least a year in the U.S., because the U.S. is a "first to invent" rather than a "first to file" jurisdiction.
"Material" prior art is, in a slightly over-simplified definition, non-cumulative prior art that tends to show that the *claimed* invention (notice the word between the asterisks -- it is important), as interpreted in a manner consistent with the detailed description of the invention, is either:
(1) completely shown in a single piece of prior art, or
(2) one in which *ALL* the claimed elements are shown in more than one reference, AND that there is a motivation, in the references themselves, for combining the teachings of the references to arrive at the *CLAIMED* invention.
What most Slashdot IANAL types fail to understand are the following points:
(1) Obviousness is measured at a relevant time in the past, not right now;
(2) Obviousness is NOT measured by how much the invention advances the state of the art, but rather by whether the invention itself is shown in the prior art, or whether there is motivation in the prior art itself to combine references to arrive at the references;
(3) Obviousness is NOT measured by whether some nerd thinks he could have arrived at the invention himself;
(4) The invention is NOT the broad statement in the abstract, but rather is as defined in the claims;
(5) Dependent claims do not stand on their own, but recursively include all of the elements recited in the claims referred to, thereby increasing the number of elements you have to find in the prior art to invalidate the patent;
(6) Correlary to (5): you do not invalidate a patent by invalidating any one claim -- each claim stands on its own; and
(7) The filing date of a patent isn't always as recent as commentators on Slashdot think it is, because they ignore and do not understand the "continuation" data on the patent.
All of the above remarks oversimplify the complexities of patent law, but serve to illustrate my point.
Misconceptions about patents have been dealt with before by patent lawyers on Slashdot before, but the "institutional memory" of Slashdot is essentially nonexistent. (Example: there are sometimes reposts of articles hours after the original post!) Moreover, it debunks many of the innumerable posts of the type "I am going to patent breathing and profit!" These people simply do not understand anything about the patent process and have never seen how difficult it actually is to get something patented. Moreover, the moderation of posts relating to patent matters is also quite poor because of the bias of the moderators.
Without offering an opinion on the subject of the present controversy, however, I can say that in general, the signal-to-noise level of posts on Slashdot regarding patents is extremely low.
There happens not to be a "formal" definition. A court is to decide whether a mark is famous by considering "factors such as, but not limited to" these.
Largely, though, they amount to whether it is "famous" in the ordinary sense of being well-known and widely identified in the target market with the senior user's goods or services, which E-Pass obviously is not.
I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
Well, if you will read the article referenced in the Slashdot news item, it says:
"Of course, Judge Jensen's ruling merely states the original judge's grounds for dismissing the action were at fault, and not that Palm's devices do infringe the patent. Palm can no longer claim that its devices do not infringe the patent on the basis of size, but they may yet prevail against E-Pass using other arguments to show a clear gap between the device described in the patent and its own products."
In other words, the article says that the appellate court did NOT say that the Palm Pilot infringes the patent. It merely says that the grant of summary judgment was incorrect because the judge in the original case didn't interpret the claims correctly. Because the case was decided on summary judgement, not enough of the facts of the case were brought out to support a decision one way or another as to whether the Palm Pilot infringed the claims. Because the appellate court reviews the correctness of the legal ruling rather than the correctness of the facts of a case, and is not the forum in which to litigate the facts of the case, the appellate court sent the case back to the proper court to hear and decide the facts and the correct interpretation of the claims. This time, maybe they will get it right.
You are right in one sense, the judge who decided it did not infringe issued an incorrect ruling, at least according to the appellate court, whose job it is to review and overturn such things. But all the appellate court did, and all it can do, is to send the case back with instructions to make the judge do it right this time. That is the way our legal system works.
In fact, if you dig deeply enough, you can find out what the appellate court actually said at:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl ?c ourt=Fed&navby=case&no=021593
In particular, the only issue they decided was this:
"The sole question presented here is whether the district court's construction of the claim term 'electronic multi-function card' requiring specific industry standard size dimensions is correct. We hold that it is not, and that summary judgment of noninfringement should not have been granted."
Basically, the appellate court found that the judge who originally decided the case read more requirements into the claims than were actually there. He read into the claims that the term "card" meant the ANSI standard size for credit cards. However, there is no mention in the claims that the "card" be the standard ANSI size.
The appellate court continued:
"Thus, the ordinary meaning of the word 'card' here, as used in the phrase 'electronic multi-function card,' is the proper construction. Because the grant of summary judgment of no literal infringement was based upon an incorrect construction, the grant of summary judgment was not proper. We note that under the correct construction of 'card' in this context -- a flat rectangular piece of stiff material -- it may be or may not be that the accused Palm Pilot devices literally infringe. At this stage in the proceedings, however, we need not address and do not decide this issue."
It is proper for the lower court to redecide the case, because the appellate court doesn't decide facts:
"Thus, the grant of summary judgment of noninfringement both literally and under the doctrine of equivalents is vacated. The case is remanded to the district court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion."
So there has been no decision yet as to whether a Palm Pilot infringes the claims.
As to your assertion about describing a very specific device, that may or may not be true in this case. I've glanced at the claims, but do not offer any opinion on that or any other matter.
However, while it is true that dependent claims are cumulative, it is the case that you only have to meet all of the elements of any ONE valid claim of a patent to infringe the patent. That claim doesn't