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Apple's iPod Interface Patent in Jeopardy
Gadget Guy writes "Apple has been denied on their quest to patent the iPod software interface. According to AppleInsider - 'Standing in Apple's way appears to be a prior filing by inventor John Platt, who submitted a patent application for a similar software design for a portable device in May of 2002 - just five months before Robbin submitted his claims on behalf of Apple.'" The Register also helps to shed a little additional light on the subject.
2002 = 2*7*11*13
That's exactly what Platt did:
So, it's obvious that the Patent Office is looking at applications and not just stamping them through w/o checking a simple search first... So we get pissed off when they don't search and we get pissed off when they do?
You can't have it both ways.
Platts patent is here I personally cant see the relevance of the patents to each other but IANAPL :)
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
The first inventor can go out and patent the idea up to 2 years after publicizing it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There is, it's called an interference. Basically, it's a way to see who devloped something first. However, they don't generally judge both patents on the merits during an interference, just the date of invention. The junior patent applicaiton will then have to narrow the scope of their claims to avoid the senior patent.
So, what's the ruckus about?
The iPod shipped October 23, 2001. This other patent was filed May 2002.
Did this other guy publish prior to the iPod shipping?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Moot.
The rejection of Platt's patent would in no way invalidate it's use as prior art for invalidating a different patent. One of the great things about patent applications, even rejected ones, is that they form a trail of prior art that can be used to invalidate future attempts to patent ideas.
I'm a nature photographer.
The United States is not a first to file Country. In fact, it's one of the last first to invent countries. The patent protection runs from the time you file, because the applicaiton is concrete prrof that you have "reduced the invention to practice". If you get bounced by prior art, in some cases you can antedate the prior art by showing through inventors notebooks, test results, etc, that you conceived the idea at a time earlier than the prior art and were dilegently working to reduce the invention to practice. In the present Apple case, they probably have nothing showing an inventin date earlier than the prior art.
The moral here is, if you're working on something cool, soemthing that you might want to patent, write it down. Even a diagram or sketch can help you if it's dated.
Freshie year of college (not that long ago) I wrote a short research paper on tech patents. Included were statistics showing the influx of patents around the tech boom, and more importantly the acceptance rate of these patents. What you could clearly see is that the acceptance rate was very high, and it wasn't because everybody was innovative. It's because at the time, the patent examiners wern't as technical in the relevant field of the patents they were examining, but this hasn't really changed much up to today. Since patents are mostly written to be over-generalized on purpose, its hard to get a real idea of what the patent is trying to do, and therefore hard to come up with prior art or to determine whether it is innovative, non-obvious, etc. Not even the computer system upgrade and bringing in more patent examiners has appeared to help with the quality of the accepted patents, or the immense backlog of patents thats causing problems.
does ANYONE deserve a 20 YEAR monopoly on ipod-like devices? No.
Does anyone deserve a monopoly that long be it a software patent or copyright? The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years.
As a consequence of the act, under current law, no copyrighted works will enter into the public domain in the United States until January 1, 2019 at the earliest, when the copyright on works created in 1923 would expire.
It just about making money!
This is very badly titled. They don't have this patent yet. It's their application that's in possible jeopardy.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
i know that Sun SPARCstations came with optical mice that used the metal, grid mouse pads, far before optical mice were offered by MS.
(off topic, i've had the same "security word" within a few days. is this intentional or detrimental?)
As a patent attorney, I can tell you that generally speaking a so-called "Final Rejection," is more dependent upon Patent Office budgeting procedures than the merits of the underlying patent application.
In order to control expenses at the PTO, and to prevent examiners from spending all their time with the more "tenacious" applicants, the PTO suggests that a second rejection typically be deemed "Final." All this really means is that you can file a "continuation" application, with a new filing fee to effectively buy more hours of the examiner's time.
While it is often annoying to clients, at least it tries to allocate costs to those people using the most resources.
No, really! I'm one of the *good* lawyers!
Hence, the lump of plastic and metal that is the iPod becomes a portable music player while it is running its software. You seem to have a problem with that. Yet if I invent a portable music player that somehow does it all in hardware, you're presumeably OK with that.
Why should the inventor who chooses to make his life easier by using software to make a portable music player not receive the same protections as the all-hardware inventor? From the end-user's point of view, it's a portable music player: s/he doesn't care how it's implemented.
Why? You mean if there were tens of millions of hardware developers out there then portable music players implemented solely using hardware shouldn't be patentable? The number of people in the field is irrelevant. Of course you are. When and how you allow the world to use it is entirely seperate from the act of its creation. Anyway, the above would seem to apply equally to all patents. So then you presumeably don't want any patents on anything whatsoever. That's precisely what a patent is for. If you want to invent something and let nobody use it, that's entirely your right. It's financially stupid of you, but you can do it. The smart thing to do is to license your patent to make money to recoup the time/money you invested on inventing in the first place.Now if you're some guy who doesn't want to spend the money to pay for the license, well then you're free to invent something new and better, and, if you're so philanthropic, give it away for free (but you'd be a fool to do so).
And how is this specific to software? Why couldn't this have been about two guys in different labs who invented some hardware device? The fact that it's software is irrelevant. A double-standard should not exist.As for this case, yes, it's seems unfair (but the unfairness has got nothing to do with the fact that it's software). Perhaps there could be something like a "co-patent" if it can be proven that two seperate, clean-room inventions were done. But that's far to problematic and lawyers would have a field day. Just like it's far simpler to say the legal drinking age is 21, it's far simpler to say he who files first, gets the patent.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
The priot-artist appears to be Microsoft . So that's a very real possibility......the MS iPod?
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
I am honestly dismayed when people ask questions like this.
I'm just trying to make a point - not defend the system. The reality of the situation is if you don't meet the quota, you don't have a job. So you work within the system and do as best you can. Even you admit you've done that.
FWIW, I would absolutely do my job correctly, which would to investigate them throughly and take the required time (especially if I was doing something that was publically funded). I think it's a poor reflection on character to take the easy way out when the right thing to do ought to be clear.
I agree. See above reasoning. BTW - the PTO isn't publicly funded. Its funded from the patent fees (and a good portion is then siphoned off into the government).
I'd be a very poor engineer if I didn't do my job properly just to please management and make them look like they are on top of things.
This isn't about doing a good job. This is about having a job. It should be about doing the best job you can. But as long as there are too many applications and the threshold for a patent is so low, the low quality of patent examination will persist. There are solutions out there for these problems, and maybe in due time they will be implemented.