Patent Lawsuits Galore

eldavojohn writes "Guess who owns the patent on the touch-screen keyboard. Not Apple — SP Technologies has filed a suit based on just that. Ars brings out the intriguing detail that the founder of the patent troll company is serving prison time for health-care fraud." Read on for four more patent developments in the day's news.
Today the news broke that Aloft is suing Microsoft and Adobe for deliberately violating the patent entitled 'Network Browser Window with Adjacent Identifier Selector.' Qualcomm had a bad day as the US Trade Representative advised the President not to intervene in the patent beef it is losing against Broadcom. Today we found out Sharp is suing Samsung for an LCD infringement. Ending an eventful day on a note of sanity, a judge today threw out the jury verdict on Alcatel-Lucent vs. Microsoft and Microsoft no longer has to pony up $1.5 billion.

Comments

Apple should be happy.

[purpledinoz]

Apple should be rejoicing, since they claim that the patent system is running perfectly.

Not "the" but one of many "a"s

[pieterh]

Guess who owns "a" patent on the touch screen keyboard. Actually, on a supposed improvement to the touch screen keyboard. This is the lovely thing about patents in general and software patents in particular; you can claim so many patents for the same thing.

The humble network plug is covered by about 45 patents iirc. At least that's a finite number.

But the average humble user interface is covered by hundreds, thousands of patents, each for minor improvements (if at all) on other peoples' work.

Software patents are designed for one thing only: to allow lawyers to parasite off engineers. /me waits for the patent lawyers to reply to this post, telling me how utterly wrong I am, and how without software patents no-one would write software.

Come on, make my day, patent punks!

Re:Not "the" but one of many "a"s

[yfarren]

Man I feel like every time anyone says anything about patents we go through the same flame war.

!PATENTS ARE JUST FOR PATENT TROLLS! !PEOPLE JUST PATENT THE SAME NEW IDEA OVER AND OVER!

I wonder if I will get modded insightful or troll for responding.

It goes like this. There are rules for what can be patented. The patent system tries to keep out obvious patents, but there is something difficult about keeping out obvious, which I will get to shortly. You can't patent the same thing twice, though one thing may be in violation of many patents as it may incorporate different patents. You can patent improvements on an already existing idea, and this is a good thing.

Patents do reward novelty. As a society, we decided hundreds of years ago that there are different kinds of intellectual property, and we would like to protect them, in exchange for some public good. As these things go, the patent system with it's up to 17 year monopoly works fairly well, as opposed to the virtual unlimited range of copyright.

Most people who have issue with patents fall have one of 2 major issues:

1. You can go off and patent any old obvious thing.
Some people who don't understand patents, or only read descriptions, and not claims (the description is the full disclosure, and is easier to read. It also isn't where the protection offered by the patent is defined, and will almost always talk about lots of prior art for a variety of legal reasons), might say that lots of patents are on something that already existed. To them I say briefly "show the prior art, the patent gets dismissed ASAP". Mostly though the prior art people talk about is one aspect of the patent.

OK. Obviousness. The patent office has some general guidelines as to what makes something "obvious" and the supreme court just threw a monkeywrench in the process (most people on slashdot would say in a good way) by saying "hey, obvious means, well OBVIOUS. And MAN that is OBVIOUS." But, here is the thing. Obvious is REALLY hard to define. Many new good ideas, which might seem trivial after the fact, but before the idea is described. Well... no-one thought of it. Try your hand at describing, in a legal or mathematical way (they are actually very similar) "obvious". Try making a formula, that you are comfortable applying to all ideas that describes "obvious". Unless you are someone who is against all Intellectual Property, you will find that difficult.

It isn't that people don't recognize there is a problem with obvious. Most people in Patent law do. But, there remains a problem of "how do you fix it"? Just bitching "man that is SOOOOO obvious", without taking the time to consider that "obviousness" is difficult to define, doesnt really help.

2. People patent things not to make them, but to charge others for using them. (Patent Trolls).
I don't have that much to say. I don't like patent trolls. Again, I am not sure I know how to defend against them. See, saying "you don't get IP coverage unless you use your patent." Is also.... Problematic. Many patents are very expensive to use. I can patent something, and then work towards bringing it to market. Or I can patent a process, so I can be the only one to use it. After a fixed period of time my patent will expire. But really, the idea is that I have sole control of the idea, until my patent expires. The courts give someone who is making something a bit of an advantage over someone who isn't using it. But They consider the use of the Idea "owned" (not the idea itself, but the specific incarnations defined in the claims cant be used). Lets say I have a new Idea for the manufacture of Microchips. It is incremental, but very useful. Now I don't have the several hundred million dollars it takes to build a chip manufacturing facility. Are you going to say that because I don't have the money to implement my idea, Intel should be able to come and use it, without licensing it? Currently, if intel used it, without licensing it, the courts probabl

Re:Great

[fastest fascist]

Without knowing any details in the relevant case, I'd like to note that the application of laws is not and should not be a democratic process. Democratic processes are not impartial.

While the US sues itself into irrelevancy...

[slashbart]

Seeing all this crap going on in "the land of the Free", I really urge all of us that are not under its jurisdiction to make damn sure there is no IP rights harmonization, converting our more sensible laws into something benefitting the American lawyer population.

Seriously, keep a sharp eye on proposed laws in your own country, that are being pushed by the U.S... In Europe we've managed to beat them once with the software patents legislation, but they keep pushing. They in this case is US goverment/Microsoft; awfully enough there is no difference, Our ms. Kroes has stated her annoyance a being approached by US ambassadors to go easy on M$. She's got some big brass ones though, and I don't see her being pushed around at all.

Bart

Re:Great

[TheJasper]

What do juries have to do with democracy? Juries are not inherently democratic nor do democracies imply juries. In fact, I personally have little to no trust in jury based decisions.
Judges have in fact been overriding juries for centuries. Appeals courts don't always tend to have juries and the higher you go the less juries you find.
Your last statement makes the least sense of all. This case isn't about the small fry against the big corporate monster. It's two big corporate monsters. So why would the judge prefer M$ to Lucent? well, unless you're implying a directer form of corruption.

Re:Misplaced blame?

[TheRaven64]

The problem with this kind of idea is that it makes the lawyer into a judge. While a lawyer is supposed to exercise some discretion in the cases they accept, it is fundamental to a fair judiciary that anyone who feels that they are wronged should be able to seek legal recourse. It's then up to the courts to decide whether they were actually wronged, as defined by the law of the land. If you start making lawyers accountable for taking cases that don't have merit, then they are going to start effectively trying cases long before they get to court, at which point there is little need to even have a court system. Lawyers are already held accountable it they take cases which are illegal (e.g. barratry) in a number of jurisdictions. Holding them accountable for frivolous lawsuits would be a dangerous precedent to set.

I would much rather see a simplification of the legal system to the state where you don't need a law degree to understand it (after all, you're expected to follow it, whether you have a law degree or not), making the whole profession obsolete.

Re:It's up to you, unless I don't agree

[TheRaven64]

The idea behind a jury trial is that you are tried by a jury of your peers. The problem with the current implementation of the system is that you are actually tried by a load of random, often uninformed, people. In cases hinged on domain-specific information, there should be an understanding that your peers must be people who understand the subject matter. A good jury for the SCO vs. IBM case would have been selected from kernel developers for QNX, BSD, etc (no System V or Linux developers, to prevent a conflict of interest). In the case of a copyright infringement case between two songwriters, a jury of other composers would have been able to make an informed decision.

The difficulty with implementing this kind of system is that if you do it in a way that allows people to volunteer for jury service in a specific case then you undermine the system even more.

RTFP

[bflynn]

RTFP - Read The Friendly Patent. The claim is for a keyboard that comes back in the same place every time. The claimed problem is that people move their keyboard around and then can't figure out how to use it. So, their innovation is that the keyboard is always in the same place. You can't move the iPhone keyboard because it takes up the entire screen. There's no place to move it to.

I wish I could say that I don't understand how this patent was ever granted in the first place, but we all know how it happens.

What irritates me about patents like this is that they fail not just tests of obviousness and novelty, but tests of history. Years ago, I used a program that had a statically placed pop-up keyboard. The keyboard always came up in a location that blocked data behind it. Didn't the patent examiner realize that the ability to move the keyboard around WAS AN INNOVATION IN THE FIRST PLACE?! Removing an added feature hardly qualifies as something worthy of a patent.

I'm not a fan of the iPhone, but I really hope this patent gets squashed with prejudice.

Brian