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Apple Patents 'Chameleon' Computer Case
Dave B writes "The Register
has been fishing at the patent office again and found that Apple has a new patent for "a computing device [which] includes a housing having an illuminable portion. The computing device also includes a light device disposed inside the housing. The light device is configured to illuminate the illuminable portion".
While this gives us the exciting prospect of an iMac that is all five fruit flavors at once surely the original iMac with its glowing power button, or indeed a-thousand-and-one other electronic gizmos represent prior art?" Update a couple of users noticed this Slashdot Story from 2002 which looks familiar.
What the poster failed to mention was that the patent also included that it was customizable via a software program. You could open the "case prefs" and sets your case to have stripes, polka dots, etc. I am sure it could probably be animated too.
I don't I've ever seen that.
It's a reference to the original fruit flavored iMacs; Apple had trouble keeping the stock numbers right due to varied demand for the five colors; Blueberry sold much better than Tangerine for instance. This was a problem because Apple demanded their resellers stock equal amounts of all five colors.
This dispute led some resellers (notably Best Buy) to stop selling iMacs.
This (or a very similar Apple patent) cropped up about a year or two ago. It was discussed then. Some people freaked out, some people used it as an opportunity to give Apple a blowjob, some people didn't care. I guess nothing changes.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
What OS are you using that is less toy like than UNIX?
Sticking a Freeplay logo on the front will be breaching his copyright. ITYM breach his trademark.
The register should probably read slashdot more often then...
This story was posted on slashdot two years ago
Apple has a new patent for "a computing device...
LOL. Slashdot and obviously the Register don't seem to be able to determine what a patent is. THIS IS AN APPLICATION, not an actual patent.
It was filed in Feb 2004 and PUBLISHED, not GRANTED on Aug 12. 20040156192 is the application number, not the patent number. Patent numbers are serial and are in the 6 million range.
Talk about egg on face.
It's "Hear, hear."
An equivilent phrasing would be "Listen, listen."
While it has come to be a cheer of assent, it is really an admonition to others to pay attention to what someone is saying.
KFG
Water goes in, steam comes out, it's the submarine. That's obvious. But how do you prevent the hot steam from raising the ambient temperature of the sub and killing everybody inside? [...] This is why patents are for SPECIFIC implementations.
I think it's clear that you haven't read the book. It's really a great read, well worth the entrance fee, so even if you don't care about patent abuse I highly recommend it. Seriously: I think everyone should read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman at least once... it's one of those books I go back to over and over again.
It is not a patent! This is a published patent application which use the format YYYY#######. Thus this is the 156,192th patent application to be published in the year 2004. Granted patent numbers are (mostly) sequential and they are somewhere around 6,750,000 right now.
The register didn't bother to do any research before green lighting this story.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
This looks to me like it's going to be a design patent when it's approved (you can tell these at a glance by the prefix D on the number,) which is a very specific sort of patent and very different from what you may normally think of in terms of patents.
A design patent protects a particular aesthetic or functional design, not any process or underlying technology.
So, it's quite reasonable that Apple would get a design patent, I'm sure they have a great many of them already. Design patents are also not particularly strong- all you have to do to get around it is make a significant alteration and you're generally all right.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
4. Patents encourage publishing your results, as opposed to keeping everything super-secret. Art is a bad example there. But there are a ton of technological processes that one could have kept secret. Or which _are_ being kept secret. Patents encourage companies to share this information with the rest of the world instead.
5. Patents get licensed all the time. I'm sure that if someone absolutely needed to do something impressionistic before the patent expired, they could have negotiated a license.
Encourage, sure, for whatever that's worth. One of the features of a patent (as opposed to a copyright) is that if you can make money selling your patented product, you can do so, but if you can make more money NOT selling your product but holding on to its patent (maybe you developed it, more likely you're in a competing business and you acquired it), you're free to do that, too. So effectively you can patent something out of existence for the period the patent is valid, because no one can sell a product which uses your patent.
Copyrights, by definition, apply to "expressions" as opposed to ideas, i.e. published works. If you choose not to publish something (well, to put it in writing), you don't have a copyright to it, and anyone else can use your idea to make their own published work (they can't steal what you never made available to steal). And if you choose to publish it, at the very least, it's subject to the rules of fair use. Fair use has taken a lot of abuse recently, but it's still a real thing. E.g. you can't stop people from talking about your work just because you have a copyright on it.
I'm not a smorgasbord.