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U.S. Bans Some Cellphones For Patent Reasons
runner_one writes "According to the New York Times, A federal agency has banned imports of new cellphones made with Qualcomm semiconductors because the chips violate a patent held by Broadcom. The International Trade Commission said today that the import ban would not apply to mobile phone models that were imported on or before June 7." Update: 06/08 13:05 GMT by KD : Glenn Fleishman notes that Apple's iPhone will be allowed into the country, since it doesn't use any 3G chips. He adds that Apple "might have the most advanced smartphone on the market unless President Bush or his trade representative overturn the ruling (which they have the power to do)."
How exactly does the free market go about fixing limited duration government granted monopolies (a.k.a. patents)?
Wow, me that's completely uneducated in wireless chip design put forward the exact idea that is patented there o.O
Seriously they've patented everything that can use a battery and reduces power usage by modifying the frequency of scanning for access ports. And then they further patented the ability to shut down unneeded parts of a wireless chip.
Unless I'm reading the patent wrong which I hope I am.
Did Qualcomm employees actually read Broadcom's patent and use the helpful diagrams to build the phone chips? I rather suspect not - this is another example of independent discovery. I understand that the patent law doesn't allow that as a defense, as it's hard to prove that someone didn't read the publicly available patent. But the fact that it happens over and over again just shows that the current system blocks progress of art and science rather than encouraging it. We have to start only allowing patents that are judged non-obvious by leading experts in the area.
Don't worry too much, if the authorities are going to arrest people just because they have bought something that in one way or another violates an IP, they should just declare the whole Earth as a prison. For all I know my travelling mug could be violating some.
After skimming the patent I'm failing to see the IP. Claim 1 basically describes a linking of attempt rate to success rate... and isn't that like the exponential backoff of ethernet? The fact that they then tie this to turning on and off a periphial (the power hungry transmitter) is the kind of optimization that laptop driver authors have been doing of years... so while prior art in the field of mobile phones may be thin on the ground there are examples all over the place.
:)
The primary and secondary examiner are listed... has anyone found an online resource that provides ranks or rates these guys? Some googling turns up proposals for community participation in the patent review process but nothing like a 'hot or not' site for examiners
If you need a state-protected monopoly to turn a profit, maybe your invention wasn't so damned good after all...
Money for nothing, pix for free
Here's a hypothetical situation:
Company A spends 5 million dollars researching how to design and manufacture widgets. They release it into the market. Company B then buy one of the first run, spends 100,000 dollars reverse engineering it, and sells it for 25% of the price Company A offers. Company A now goes out of business.
It's really not that hard to understand, unless you're on Slashdot, where everything someone else came up with is obvious and stupid, but only once they've come up with it.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
He's obviously suggesting that there is a value to patents, so long as there are consequences for issuing bad patents. Perhaps his use of the term "free market" is unfortunate, however his point stands.
If there were penalties for issuing patents which are later invalidated, we'd see the USPTO put more effort into researching the patents they receive, rejection of overly broad patents, and probably eventually start seeing fewer patents requested in general. Then truly innovative inventions would receive patent protection, and every Microsoft, Broadcom, and Qualcomm wouldn't issue patents on every tiny thing they do in an effort to protect their research.
It seems to me like you're acting more like the troll, pedantically focusing on one single term that the poster got wrong rather than reading his post and understanding his point. You're like the guy who points out the fact that someone misuses the word 'infer' and uses that to try to tear down the entire argument.
When the patent system is abused, it's not a free market. The people attacking the current abusive patent practices a trying to restore the free market.
Liberty uber alles.
The real question at this point I don't see being asked is, how likley is this to be overturned? Since it has such a broad impact, I would think that the thought might be to overturn this - yet at the same time, you can't just trample on patent owners rights from above every time they become inconvenient, if you were being an idealist you would let the ruling stand and them demand expidited review of the patents in question to be sure they were valid, or overturn them. If they are held to be valid under closer revue then in fact it would seem fair they should stand.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seriously, if the only value we hold is IP that is locked in patents then what happens to our value when those patents do expire?
We will just stop them from expiring, like our perpetually extended copyrights.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
It's kind of obvious that you are not an active software engineer. Practically no one calls any educational material a "software textbook". The practical software engineering books I've seen do contain actual source code to demonstrate non-obvious methods. While a patent may be readable to a patent lawyer or even a patent engineer, it's certainly not readable to the wider engineer community who are supposed to benefit from the publication of patents.
Most importantly, when people who actually try to teach novel, non-obvious concepts to others write articles and textbooks, they make an effort to explain their ideas in the simplest possible way (but not any simpler), and even then it takes a concerted effort for the reader to actually understand the concepts. As a way of publishing technical ideas, the patent process is a mere caricature of the actual process of publishing novel technical inventions. I'm sure patents are great for patent lawyers, but that's just a demonstration of the inanity of the entire concept.