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Smartphones Patented — Just About Everyone Sued 1 Minute Later
This week the US Patent and Trademark Office issued a surprisingly (although I guess it shouldn't be) broad patent for a "mobile entertainment and communication device". Upon closer inspection you may notice that it pretty much outlines the ubiquitous smartphone concept. "It's a patent for a mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files. The patent holding firm who has the rights to this patent wasted no time at all. At 12:01am Tuesday morning, it filed three separate lawsuits against just about everyone you can think of, including Apple, Nokia, RIM, Sprint, ATT, HP, Motorola, Helio, HTC, Sony Ericsson, UTStarcomm, Samsung and a bunch of others. Amusingly, the company actually first filed the lawsuits on Monday, but realized it was jumping the gun and pulled them, only to refile just past the stroke of midnight. "
anyone?
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I would be pissed that all these tech companies rake in the money by ripping off my invention. Good thing the patent system protects our geniuses from intellectual property theft.
no "smartphone" required. my 2 year old Verizon LG VX8300 is a "... mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files ..."
These guys will be smashed into paste by hordes of the highest paid lawyers on planet Earth first thing Monday morning.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Can you hear me now?
putting abusive people in jail would make them think twice
they cost money to other companies, but also to state and law
how can tribunal tolerate such behaviour and not fine a big toll ?
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
Do these people think they can actually win any of those lawsuits? They have to realize that all those organizations have hordes of lawyer minions at their disposal that will beat them into a fiscal pulp!
Weaksauce as they say...
I hope this serves to further put an end to this ridicules state the patent have become. I've been wanting to actually patent the idea of patenting things that were so obvious that I could then sue everyone that infringed upon my patent...that way I could sue all these patent holding companies.
Finally, a firm got enough balls to blatantly abuse the living crap out of the patent system. Maybe this will start the much needed rework of the patent system.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Instead of the standard being that you cant patent what's obvious, the standard should be that you can't patent something unless its clever. And the twenty year patent period needs to be shortened in these days of rapid tech progress.
I say, "good for them!".
Perhaps this is just what we need to make congress re-think our amazingly incompetent patent office. Clearly, computers can do all of this stuff, and a cell phone / PDA is just a hand-held version of a computer. Nothing really novel, but that never stopped the patent office.
Unfortunately, I missed my chance to patent patent trolling and further patenting the patenting of patent trolling. Etc.
I don't know, but it works for me.
Update kit consists of one drop of superglue, which you apply to the flash card. Presto -- no removable storage.
Who's laughing now, Mr. Patent Troll?
I have always wondered what patent troll companies got out of filing for patents that obviously have loads of prior art. Have any of them ever been successful at sueing a big company for an obvious concept that has tons of prior art? I cant imagine that any of the companies listed would want to just give money to the patent troll for fear of attracting more of them.
I can only hope that continued use of these (in my opinion frivolous) patent lawsuits will eventually force a revamp of how the patent system works.
The company filed a nonsense obvious patent. The examiner was overworked and didn't understand it anyway, tossed a coin and it was heads, passed the patent. Company gets lucky and tries to sue everyone.
America, America, America. I'm afraid you all have to stay behind after school.
My little Linux and tech blog
They do realize that IBM, from it's lofty perch near the top of the Fortune 500, doesn't take too kindly to patent extortion? Especially pathetic ones like this? The same IBM that is a company that does not manufacture phones of any kind, smart or otherwise? The same IBM that has a larger patent portfolio than the next-highest competitor by a substantial margin? The same company that probably has a patent on breathing and a another patent on filing patent lawsuits? The same IBM with a quite famous, take-no-prisoners legal strategy? The same IBM that just spent more in legal fees fighting SCO than the company was worth?
Methinks a couple of those plaintiffs are going to get dropped from the suit, quite quickly. Unless of course IBM wants to make an example of them (not out of the question), in which case they will have their patent forcibly invalidated, with maybe some Sherman Act sprinkled on top for good measure.
SirWired
I just roll my eyes and think is the USPO as dumb as the Fed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone
The first smart phone was developed way back when. But let's consider a more recent example:
The Nokia Communicator line was the first of Nokia's smartphones starting with the Nokia 9000, released in 1996.
The earlier chained patents was 1997. So I really wonder what pot, and I do mean pot, the people in the patent office are smoking.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
This is one of the best cases for a production phone/pda that is prior to this filing:
HP OmniGo 700LX
If you get such a patent, put it in a shell company, sell the stock, many billions, move on, goto 10.
My little Linux and tech blog
I'd wager that this is someone trying to make a point about how broke the patent system is.
Hmmm...maybe it is Vonage!
Patent trolls wouldn't exist if this type of asshatery didn't work. Not only can they win this but they likely will at least see large amounts of cash from some source that is much bigger than them and seeks to improve their patent portfolio which will be used to trade for the use rights of other corporations' patents.
No, they will make their blood money, lawyers will be happy, and the barrier to entry in this industry will be raised higher.
Overhaul the U.S. patent system now!
I noticed that they left out God...!!!!
Maybe this kind of exposure is good to illuminate some of the shortcomings of our patent system.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Do you think I could patent the business model of patent trolling? Then sue all the companies needlessly tying up our legal and patent systems with this crap. Just a thought... maybe Ive just been at work too long.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
The way to patent troll is to go after a few small companies that can't afford to fight back, score those victories, then use the precedent to go after the big money.
Generally a patent cannot just be a bunch of parts thrown together. There has to be coherence to it, an unexpected synergy that makes the whole more than the sum of the parts.
I'm trying to find the synergy here. Pure convenience, perhaps?
Smartphones were my idea.
Copycats...
WTG USPO! WTG USA for making and allowing such a system that is so easily abused by patent trolls. Where is the incentive NOT to do shit like this?
Looks like Vonage is safe from being sued this time!
Sometimes they do .. for example the RIMM versus a patent holding company called NTP:
.. but I dunno what it does to the conscience.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/03/technology/rimm_ntp/
Other situations companies settle such as this one where a company claimed it owned rights to JPEG
http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2005/02/21/daily14.html
So yeah, patent trolling can be quite lucrative from a financial standpoint
It details 125 combinations of things in a hand-held device.
Here's the first the rest are an extensive list of variations on the theme:
1. A mobile entertainment and communication device for communicating with the Internet and remotely located telephones, comprising: a housing of a palm-held size; a cellphone provided in said housing, said cellphone adapted for selectively and wirelessly connecting to the Internet and remotely located telephones and adapted for controlling selection of at least one of (1) downloading data or uploading data from or to the Internet, or (2) downloading data to a computer or other electronic device and said cellphone having at least one of (1) voice controlled dialing, (2) a wireless earphone or (3) a wire connection jack earphone with a microphone for operation of the mobile entertainment and communication device; a memory operatively connected to said cellphone; a microprocessor operatively connected to said memory; said microprocessor adapted for storing data to said memory that is received from the Internet or a remotely located telephone; and a display panel operatively connected to said microprocessor, said display panel adapted for reproducing images or other data from at least one of said memory or the Internet, said other data including at least one of moving images, combined sounds and moving images, or music with or without images.
The whole thing looks like the product of a brainstorming session with everything under the sun included in the list.
The patent was filed on Nov 20, 2003. It lists an inventor but they haven't invented anything as far as I can tell only tried to be the first ones to list these items together in a patent application. In going over the list I doubt there's anything to terribly non-obvious in there. I'd be surprised if this isn't challenged rather than just paid out, but that's just an opinion and IANAL.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
They did what now? Are they asleep at the patent office? I regularly read here about stupid patents being pursued, but according to the story, this patent was actually issued. How can you patent something that others have already thought of? And evidently the only use of this patent is making money by sueing people who have thought of something after claiming it. I always thought there were smart people at patent offices, after all, they need to be able to check thoroughly if something isn't already patented in some way and didn't Einstein work as a patent clerk? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Patent_office But apparantly, I was wrong.
Patents should be used to protect years of hard work and investments, not used as a ploy in order to blackmail others. That is what they are attempting to do, extortion.
Patents are being abused on all sides. To stifle competition (Microsoft and others), to extort money from others (these guys) but nobody appears to be doing anything about this.
This is unfair, but worst of all, these activities can't be good for innovation. Patents were invented to promote innovation, to protect the work that had gone into them. But if patents are now abused to protect companies from competition or make money off of someone else's back, then who will want to do the hard work needed to create something new?
Seriously, soon as I RTFA, the first thought that went through my head was that SOMEBODY has had enough of the USPO and decided to make as big a splash as possible, using a device that most people own, as a means to bring the entire issue to the PUBLIC, at large.
I doubt they are trying to actually win this thing, but merely point out that there are some SERIOUS problems with the patent system.
What better way to do so then to do it in grand fashion? The media are going to put up articles stating such stuff as "Is your cellphone doomed?", etc. etc.
Let the media do the ground work.
So, calm down. If it works, the patent system will get the desperately needed overhaul it deserves as a result.
Basically you can gather a list of blue sky requirements, write them up in legalese and then apply for a patent. Easy! Any half-witted project manager can do that in their sleep.
It's trivial to list requirements. Actually solving the many problems in realising the requirements is where all the work is, and applications like this indicate nothing like that.
There is no technical detail here that indicates the patent applicant ever intended to make anything or worse - ever solved any of the problems involved in designing a product like this.
That's where I think the patent system fails - you can essentially patent a requirements document without ever needing to progress further. It's not rewarding an inventor, because an inventor would have either created a prototype or created a design sufficiently detailed to allow a prototype to be built.
Patents like this reward the wrong people.
i've been going through the motions of getting some software patented (using a specialist law firm in chicago) and mid-way through the process, i stopped proceedings to entirely rework / rethink the project, because some troll like this had written a patent for something disturbingly simple, and worded it such that it expanded miles beyond it's scope... to a point that it encroached on... well... everything...
every time i see cases like this, i have to wonder... do i just need shadier patent lawyers? or should i just rely on the people who review these things to be completely blind to all prior art?
now is the winter of our discotheque
Companies that do this kind of bullshit should not only have their officers face legal action, but their corporate charter revoked and their assets liquidated.
A hardship for the shareholders? Maybe, but also, too fucking bad.
I guess in the end, given the debacle that was the NTP/RIM lawsuit, I would not be completely surprised. What bothers me, and just about everyone else out there is that there is nothing, well, at least nothing that I'm hearing or reading about, being done to put an end to this. Just because people here on /. talk about it doesn't mean that anything is ever going to get done. This is of concern to me because I have a BlackBerry. I am a BB Admin at work, and I deal with these things daily. What I don't understand is how patent holding companies are not squashed out of existence. Obviously the founding fathers had no idea the "system" would be abused the way that it has, and that the judicial system is for the most part rather uneducated regarding technology, meaning we see "unfair" judgments regarding these cases. Secondly, I feel that we need someone, at least one person that has some semblance of common sense in the USPTO. Hey, I can wish, can't I?
It really is disappointing that nothing is made of this, and that this isn't making at least CNN bottom of the news hour. We have really messed our priorities up here in the US. It is really something that all of us can be ashamed of. Lets stop just talking about change, and really go out and at the very least, try to make something happen.
"He Who Dares Wins"
Don't they have to try to negotiate on good faith with these companies before filing a suit?
The patent in question is owned by a company called Minerva Industries. If you look at their web site their "products" consist of nothing more than their accumulated portfolio of patents. It's safe to say that this company has no products to speak of and is simply your typical patent troll.
IBM's expansive patent portfolio would appear to be worthless as a legal lever against a company that neither manufactures nor sells anything, unless some portion of Minerva's smartphone patent is covered by other patents IBM retains.
Regardless, I have to agree with you that Minerva taking on the biggest of the big in the technology sector with this legal challenge is sheer stupidity.
Even better idea: Every new phone is described on the box as "unassembled/assembly required before use."
Each phone ships with a dropper of superglue and a flyer which instructs the owner to superglue the media card in place before use.
Now if the owner chooses not to blatently disregard the assembly instructions that's not the manufacturer's fault, is it?
I was looking up what "prior art" really means, and I found this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_invent
A cursory Google search seems to reinforce that the US is NOT first-to-file but first-to-invent. So, my question is how the hell do people still get patents on things already invented? The smartphone has been around for a long time now, and this patents is just continuation after continuation after continuation. How does this stuff make it through? Are patent examiners REALLY so stupid as to not understand cell phones have been doing these things for YEARS? Do they even LOOK at applications anymore? I honestly don't understand this level of absurdity.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
...then they should just be shot[2]. Or strung up. Or drug behind horses til dead. Whatever. Good old fashioned wild west justice.[1]
[1] Sorry for the syntax; there's a national comma shortage.
[2] And if they are then it's an awfully expensive way to make that point for everyone else.
I'm really curious if this ever works out in the favor of the bad-guy. I see this pop up in the news quite frequently, so I assume someone must actually cave in and give these guys money? Anyone know?
Sweet!
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I thought the title of the submission was just figuratively describing the speed of the lawsuits by saying "1 minute later" but that's exactly what happened.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
But the patent is vague enough to cover non-'smartphone's. Removable storage, camera and media player is a pretty common set of features on most phones, even those not designed to run your life. That's your first point gone.
Second one, however, sounds good to me.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
......That /. is playing into this scenario quite well.
Property is theft.
only to refile just past the stroke of midnight.
Where can you file anything at midnight?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Do this a few times and shareholders will be electing boards with actual morals and ethics beyond "How hard can we screw them." Corporations are a privilege created by the people, for the benefit of the people. If it isn't working out that way, we need to kill them.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You go to a large and know company and license it to them for a dollar.
Use that as a bigger stick.
BTW, not IBM.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'll polish my rifle and wait for an answer.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
First and foremost, the claims of this patent are not innovative or novel. They are merely obvious incremental advances in product complexity. The reason these people were able to list them all in a patent application years before the technology hit the market is simply because there were significant technical barriers preventing manufacturers from making a device with these features at the time. Without the basic technology to actually build the device, it's not possible to adequately describe the implementation for patent purposes. That brings us to the second major issue: Failure to reduce the idea to practice. The claims are stated, but at the time the patent application was filed there were significant technical limitations that prevented such a device from actually being built by anyone - and the application did not provide solutions to those problems. Moreover, the company did not undertake any ongoing research to find a solution to those problems (they just waited 10 years for others to do so). Consequently the application fails to provide enough information for one "skilled in the art" to reproduce the invention. In other words, it's a "flying car patent" - an idea is described that is not technically feasible and no practical implementation is detailed. I doubt the legal eagles will have too much of a problem shooting this one down. I think the interesting part is that it was ever granted in the first place. This is a fairly clear indication that the USPTO is relying on subsequent litigation as part of the review process.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
"I hereby swear under penalty of perjury that I am filing this lawsuit in good faith. Furthermore, if my lawsuit is found to be without merit, and is dismissed with prejudice, then my corporate charter shall be dissolved, and my corporation's holdings shall be split and sold to the highest bidder at public auction. Furthermore, my corporate officers, who are members of my corporation's board at time of filing, shall be individually levied personal fines of 3x their individual annual personal income (consisting of, but not limited to: salary, bonuses, incentives, and all other forms of income), as calculated on the year this lawsuit was filed. My corporation furthermore cannot be sold, merged, transferred, or acquired by any other entity until the lawsuit is concluded, nor can board members be replaced except in the event of death or permanent incapacitation. My corporation furthermore cannot issue any further financial instruments during this time period, until the lawsuit is concluded (instruments include but are not limited to: stock issues, bond issues, or any other forms of publicly traded debt)."
That would simultaneously wipe out the RIAA, the MPAA, and damned near every real patent troll on the planet...
(PS: if you can improve on it or correct dumb mistakes that I was bound to include inadvertently, please, go for it).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
which was first described back in 1968 ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook
So the story says they sued Apple among others. Isn't one of the complaints that some people have against the iPhone that it Doesn't have removable storage? That would seem to exempt them from this patent.
Mike Scanlon
They seem to be trying to say that Apple produce a device with "one or more replaceable memory card sockets for receiving a blank memory card for recording data directly from the Internet"...
Hmmmmmm.....
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
what needs to happen is that they demonstrate, from the get-go, a device that does exactly what the patent describes. Enough of these theoretical patents already - describe, and demonstrate, an actual implementation of the thing and demonstrate how the implementation is non-trivial (+ the usual prior art discovery, etc.)
IANAL, but if I can dig up the receipt for my Treo 270 (purchased in May, 2003), I think that might qualify as prior art.
Isn't the standard procedure for a patent troll to pick the smallest infringing fish, go to court and hope to establish a precedent, THEN go for Sony, Apple, Sprint, etc?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
IIRC that lasted FOUR YEARS
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
Isn't it more likely corruption?
I don't have mod points today.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
And someone needs to start a group on the net to push for such legislation.
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
I goggled the company that is the holder of the patent, apparently they also hold patents on Seat Belts and Air bags...... wtf!! http://www.gigatec.com/index.asp is the site that lists the other patents.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
I'm beginning to believe that one could get a patent for "Urination by a Male Adult Human While Seated" from the idiots in the patent office.
The patent was originally filed on November 30, 2003. Can anyone say for sure there was prior art before this date?
:)
Here's an IT Week Review of the Treo 600 dated November 6, 2003.
It sounds like they read the review and worked up a patent for it over the Thanksgiving holiday.
How about a new standard for patents - that if a patent is filed when a practitioner of the art would ordinarily know the patent to be invalid, and the patent is not withdrawn between the time of filing and the time of issue, that it's a criminal offense?
This is getting out of hand - not the least of which that it's over 4 years since filing for this patent to issue because the system is all gummed up with bogus patents.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Exhibit A:
Your Honor, would you please show us your cell phone, and tell the court when you bought it?
An even more blatant example: Intellectual Weapons.
(They buy vulnerabilities from security researchers, and then they try to patent all possible security fixes)
Seriously. I'm not at all sure that having their patent case demolished is good enough.
This kind of blood-sucking behavior is so transparently in bad-faith, so anti-productive, and so greedy, that it ought to carry criminal penalties.
Like the people who throw in clauses that trigger penalties and ridiculous interest rates for early payoff on loans, these are not the kind of people who cooperate in a society, they're psychopathic parasites.
But for whatever reason, right now we live in a society that rewards them instead of punishing them.
Tweet, tweet.
It looks to me like the '97 patent actually might have some merit. The continuations area pain/annoyance, but it seems like either way, this guy might be owed some money.
The one thing that annoys me about this is I remember seeing promotional videos for PCS when the technology first came out (prior to '97) which suggested that some day basically everything covered in this patent would happen. At some point we just need to recognize that some things are just an inevitable result of progress, rather than innovations in their own light?
sigs are a waste of space
Is there anyone who is willing to try to file a patent for a "Patent office" and see if it gets patented and then try to sue the USPO? After these news, it just might work.
That's OK; I never use my phone's camera anyway, and I certainly don't ever watch any video. So hopefully, this patent will restrict us all back to extremely simple cellphones which only do voice and little else. It'd be even better if another patent troll came out with a patent on texting/SMS, and all the cellphone makers had to remove that.
If we're going to have this crappy patent system, we deserve to be stuck with 20-year-old technology. Because in the end, it's really all our fault (the voters).
I'd just look for a patent clerk driving a Lamborghini. Why look to stupidity when we have other equally icky human motivations for this?
I'm serious.
This almost has to be the work of bribery. How the hell could anyone not know that people have been putting video on cellphones already? How could you possibly claim that you haven't seen this before? Either it's bribery, or there's a patent clerk out there somewhere who doesn't own a TV and is communicating solely by carrier pigeon.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
But I have decided that I should keep my ideas with me and take my own small inovations to the grave. This patent thing seems to be designed so that spending all my time on the bench = guarantee that any money I make will automatically be forfiet to some patent holder I never heard off. I'm sorry if I sound like a defeatest but I don't see any incentive. Excuse me while I go burn all my research.
It used to be that if you had a patent, you could force an injunction prohibiting anyone from infringing on it while the patent was contested. Even if, two years later, your patent is rightly ruled invalid, you've already destroyed the company producing a legitimate product, and the threat of that was enough to blackmail companies into paying lots and lots of cash to the patent trolls.
Supreme Court fixed that last year though, and now judges have a lot more options available to them than just issuing a 'do not produce, use or sell' injunction. That takes most of the teeth out of the blackmailing attempt, so I'm not sure what this is going to get the patent trolls this time around except large legal bills.
Apparently the patent troll office didn't realize the rules have changed.
paintball
IAPE (I am a patent examiner). I can not discuss the merits of this case, but I can lay out some of the requirements to receive a patent.
The specification is to be in enough detail that one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was made would possess sufficient knowledge to know how to make and use the invention based upon applicants disclosure. This does not mean that gate/circuit level designs are required, nor that enough detail must be present to enable a layman to make and use the invention or that the program code to implement the invention is required.
Examiners can do a 35 USC 101 rejection for enablement/best mode/in possession of the invention etc, if not enough detail is present to detail how to make/use the invention.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Somehow I think the companies in question will /want/ this to drag on, and on, and on... until the patent troll realizes all of its resources are sucked dry. At which point the patent troll will be toyed around with some more in court and finally killed.
HP, Apple, etc. will want to make an example out of this one.
But these trolls are describing a phone that not only had *each* of the features they claim, but in fact had *all* of them and still fit in a hand-held form factor. I'm pretty skeptical about the ability to fit a GPS device into a phone back in 2000 and still have it be hand-held, though hand-held GPS was certainly available. (I'm even more skeptical about the ability to have a satisfactory battery life if you did.) And I'm even more skeptical about the claim that they actually *did* reduce their concept of these devices to practice.
If you're not required to actually come up with the technology to build the thing, I'm perfectly able to imagine one of these things that fits in your ear canal and runs all year without recharging... So send me my check once you've built the thing.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Where can you file anything at midnight?
Right here. I hear they filmed it for a long running reality series about people with no tans.
I like music
Minerva (the trolling company run by one John Ki Kim) also filed a similar suit against 44 companies last June... From their website: http://www.gigatec.com/news060607.asp
Have a look at their "Products" section. It consists of some technical drawings related to a patent filing: http://www.gigatec.com/products.asp
Minerva Inc also claims the patent for vehicle air bags. I smell the conspiracy here - get everyone to use cell phones while driving and have more accidents - then they'll need more air bags and more cell phones.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
... I've been filing for continuation on a patent that was originally applied for in 1845. When I finally let rip, I'll begin suing people who make not just smartphones, but cellular phones, touch-tone phones, rotary phones, the estate of Alexander Graham Bell, and the guys who wrote the patent being talked about in this story.
Sincerely,
SCO
-Vendal Thornheart
Someone quick, go file a patent on the wheel. Then sue EVERYBODY.
A SIM card is removeable storage is it not? The amount of data it stores is small, but it stores data and is removeable.
The IBM Simon, the first smartphone, did most what this patent claims* back in 1994.
* It could even play midi files. =)
They just need to find some investors. They'll get very rich if they can win a few of those lawsuits.
There's also the chance of settlements.
I've been watching all this patenting nonsense, it's clearly out of control. Like when IBM patented clicking a checkbox on a computer. Hello? They're just getting a reason to launch a lawsuit against someone.
To date, I've seen patents on:
1. Streaming music over the Internet
2. Our DNA (due to a loophole in the system, DNA that's altered from it's natural form (or isolated for studying) isn't considered a living thing. Searching USPTO patents returns over 96,000 matches for "DNA")
3. Playing a video game over the Internet
4. Taking a test online
Just to name a few.
So the whole thing is hurting us. Scientists can't find the cure to cancer or other conditions because they have to go through a legal process just to be able to study certain DNA. People looking for a get-rich-quick scam can just swoop into the USPTO and patent an idea they know is already being used, then sue the company.
For instance, take UCLA geneticist Wayne Grody. He was trying to help deaf children. He was conducting clinical tests on Connexin 26, a human gene linked to deafness, hoping it would lead to more effective treatment for kids. Then one day he received a letter from Athena Diagnostics, a Massachusetts based biotech company. They told him they owned the patents to Connexin 26, and he either had to pay Athena thousands of dollars or abandon research. He abandoned research that could have found the cure to deafness due to the fact that he couldn't afford such an outrageous price. This is one of the thousands of stories like this I've heard.
The system needs to be reformed. I think everyone should write to Congress asking them to completely reform the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The huge number of disjunctives in the claim (not allowed in UK patent applications, they'd need separate "main" claims to ensure clarity) make it hard to determine the true scope - as a UK application I'd say it lacks clarity.
... that's an awful narrow claim. My gut suggests that file wrapper estoppel will be involved somewhere, that the application slipped through based on some statement made about the invention that isn't explicit in the evidence we have here.
For example that end clause
Patent US7321783 claim 1 >>> "said display panel adapted for reproducing images or other data from at least one of said memory or the Internet, said other data including at least one of moving images, combined sounds and moving images, or music with or without images."
[see eg http://v3.espacenet.com/origdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=US2004110545&F=0&QPN=US2004110545%5D
Can be reduced as a display panel for playing music from a memory. How does a display panel play music? Perhaps this is a feature of recordation (Korean derivation?) devices!
You might also interpret the need for "connecting to [...] remotely located telephones" as being some sort of direct connection; this doesn't appear to be in the spec and so the claim would need clarifying to show this isn't the case.
However, looking at the HP OmniGo 700LX as a suggested citation - not withstanding the clarity issues - this is a palmtop for external attachment of a cellphone. The case in point is distinct in claiming "a cellphone provided in said housing" and in context and in light of teh description this appears to mean that it's a single integrated device and not an attachable unit.
Again wrt the OmniGo citation the claim 1 requires "at least one of (1) voice controlled dialing, (2) a wireless earphone or (3) a wire connection jack earphone with a microphone for operation of the mobile entertainment and communication device;" I don't think any of those 3 features is mentioned in that disclosure. Indeed the drafting "for operation of the mobile entertainment and communication device" suggests [I'd need to study the description in detail for this part] that the wireless-earphone or jack-wired-earphone-mic would have to be used to control ("for operation") the device.
Other devices like the Nokia 9210 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9210) didn't have wireless earphones nor jack-wired mics it appears. Indeed were there any phones with wireless earphones before bluetooth?
My brief look at the spec suggests they really thought the invention was the use of a memory card that you could download music from the 'net on to. But that's an instant opinion, similarly I only really looked at claim 1, other claims may be broader. Glancing at claim 10 (for example) I see it's drafted badly for the patent owner too
I'm just a failed UK patent examiner though so what would I know! - yeah I know I must be an idiots idiot, hey.
Will launching a frivolous lawsuit such as the ones described in this article ever be a risk for a company or lawyer? Do we have something in place to protect the system from being abused? Or are we just holding out hope that the patents won't be given in the first place? I really hope something will be done about the poor state of the US legal system, and soon. Are there any other countries in the world that have similar problems?
The patent was filed in 2000.
/.er pointed in this thread, back then miniaturisation wasn't advanced enough cram every single mentioned in the patent (media, photo, GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth, Internet, Storage, etc. I think "portable gaming console" and "barcode reader" are the only functions they forgot to mention) all together inside a mobile phone case, but a lot of companies already had a couple of them already and were showing at each possible occasion, mock-ups of future products that promised to cram even more function and to be released into market any time soon.
I just can't think of a tech show in the late 90s that DID NOT feature at least 3 different demos of some such convergence PDA that the companie promised to bring into market any moment soon.
2000, that's after the PalmOS-based PDA, Windows CE based PDA, the Newton, Dreamcast's VMU memory/console hybrids, and tons of other palm-sized gadgets have all been available for quite some time.
Granted, as some other
In fact it's much harder to think about a company that DID NOT had Piror Art on this patent.
(Hum.... Caterpilar, maybe ? Or maybe not. Possibly they had had some partnership with some rugged PDA maker like Symbol...)
And that's only about actual device. Now add the abundant mention in science fiction of such portable device, and you realize that a multi-function PDA is something completely plain fucking obvious and fails the "non trivial" requirement for a patent.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
what an ingeniously fool-proof way to commit suicide - deliberately piss off a large herd of enormous elephants.
The IBM Simon was a smartphone with a PCMCIA slot for memory, able to send faxes, built in modem and terminal app. Except for power everything was done on the full front LCD display. It could also play midi files. =)
Except for video playback it seems pretty prior art to me.
Wow I never thought we would get mentioned on Slashdot for doing this!
Grog patents the wheel. Hilarity ensues.
You got us into this mess. Now it's about time you got us out of it.
Honestly, if you keep this up sooner or later it's going to be open season on lawyers.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
weird; "purely philosophical" pursuits don't count as infringement. If there was a commercial aspect to Grody's work then it's a different matter.
Since the SCO case is all but dead, this is a windfall for those folks representing IBM. They are all spun up, have the teams in place and hitting on all cylinders, and no racetrack. Until now that is.
IBM doesn't take kindly to extortionists. They prefer to spend tens or hundreds of millions just to grind them through the gears of the legal system instead. I wonder if the troll has the fiscal backing to actually win a legal war of attrition with IBM? Especially if IBM can ally with some others in this suit and really put forth the legal version of an all out armored division blitz backed by air support?
Maybe Groklaw will pick up on this one too. PJ needs something to replace the death throes of SCO with.
They are really fighting the start of the third digital bubble aren't they? Its just Old Money vs. New Money again...
wow i love my country, maybe i should put in my patent for the wheel and bi-pedal locomotion
See this is what happens when the writers go on strike, we have to create our own entertainment...
Any problem caused by a tank can be solved by a tank.
And here we see again what happens when laws are made by lawyers, for lawyers. Anyone who looks for the lawyers in shining armour who will knock these leeches into pulp come the next day fail to see the point. As far as the lawyers are concerned the law does fullfill its intended purpose by making society fully dependent on their 'services'. Kind of like the way rat catchers in days gone by might have spread rats through the city, thereby creating panic and calls for their service.
A politician who wrote a law which stated that from this point in time on anyone who wished to engage in economical activity could not do so until he paid due to his party would immediately be recognized for what she is. A lawyer writing a similar law telling the public to pay due to their caste is for some strange reason not recognized for what he is.
In many countries it is practice to have a civilian head the armed forces. This is supposed to ward off the danger of having those armed forces take over the government. A similar construction might help to avoid creating the current abysmal state of (parts of) the legal system which has turned into a sort of social security for the legal caste. Sure, lawyers will still be needed to work on the nitty-gritty details - like soldiers deployed on the battlefield. But in the same way as most societies do not tolerate those soldiers to impose a constant state of emergency and military rule those societies should not tolerate a constant state of legal emergency.
Laws should be written to benefit society as a whole. Not just to feed part of it.
--frank[at]unternet.org
Then again, you should never trust what you hear on teh Intarweb. Just because this guy tells the story that way, doesn't mean that that's actually what happened, I'm sure Athena Diagnostics has a somewhat different story. That doesn't mean the patent system isn't fucked though, it surely is!
Or did you mean Nazgûl? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazg%C3%BBl
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
"It's a patent for a mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files. :"It's a patent for a mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files.
I really really liked the Ericsson 388 model since this was the first model that had some IrDA similar infrared connection that could link up to
a PC and use proprietary software to up/down-load the address book! This was really nice since it made it so much easier when upgrading to a new phone, so easy to transfer the address book to the new phone. Yeehah.
:-(
In the mid 90s I held a customer facing role at Ericsson, and as such had to use the very latest and greatest model of Ericsson phones always. And also had to upgrade to a new one everytime a new model was released.
1, removable storage
Prior to E388, there were models like E337 which were nice but didnt have a way to link it with a PC.
In order to "migrate" the address book you would have to manually select a subset of all phone book listings stored on the phone and transfer them to the SIMM card. (The phone could store hundreds of entries while the SIMM card could only really host some 10-20 entries) Then you moved the SIMM over to the new pohone and copied them from the SIMM into the new phones serial-eeprom.
10-20 entries at a time.
The simm card is removable. The simm card was used to store data to move over to a different device. the simmcard was removable storage.
Removable storage for a handheld phone. Available in E337 and earlier modes since 1995 or so. TICK.
2, internet connection SMS. There were legions of "internet gateways" to link internet websites to SMS so you could use some "modified" services from the internet by sending SMS and then get an SMS back. Some of those were simple searches. Others were a SMSWebserverSMS application I wrote myself and ran for select ericsson employees where by sending "magic" SMS messages to a certain host, would result in a webserver searching the internet for a stockprice for the SMS provided share and send an SMS back to the user. this was in 1996.
Internet connection : TICK.
3, Download of Audion. These are from the mid 90s as well, well before any phone had any polyphonic capabilities or before anyone had even imagined that they could one day play samples or music.
You did have single voice, different pitch of BEEP though.
You could SMS to certain places something like "DUKENUKEM" and they would send you back an SMS of 30-50 characters in ASCII that would "represent" in BEEP BiiP Boop style the title music for DUKENUKEM or other games. You typed these characters into nthe "ringtone generator" and your phone would have a ringtone that in SinclairSpectrum BEEP style in some sense (if you really concentrated) would sound similar to DUKENUKEM.
I downloaded this to my phone since I was an absolute fan of this game.
Download audion : TICK.
For the other : camera or video. No we didnt have this on the phones in the mid 90s.
At the bottom of the
Why can't you discuss this case? Would you accept it?
An invention is HOW someone solved the real life problems to get the result stated. This "patent" is a result stated. It doesn't say that it used someone's patent X to solve isochonicity, and then added foo and bar to the equation to enable reliable transfer of data from/to the removable storage to medate the problem that people can REMOVE removalbe storage.
When stephensons' Rocket was invented, there was a FULL schematic. You could build one from the patent application and schematics. So why does it no longer require a circuit diagram? It can be stylised in the same way as the london underground doesn't show it as it REALLY is but how it's connected.
Do those three minutes count as presentation, or should they laugh longer while they're enjoying themselves?
No patent left behind!
This is actually very good news! Quote: "The best way to rid of a bad law is to enforce it rigorously" Only good can come from this. The US patent system is one of the worst around as it enforces patents like these and software patents. Stop the patents! They no longer do what they were designed to do. They stall businesses and people. They give legal weapons to people who shouldn't have them at all. Time for something else.
Not if you want your device to work, it isn't.
I would define 'removable storage' as storage I can plug in, write data to, remove and carry on with my device operating normally. Start up a mobile phone over here in the UK without a SIM in it and you'll get a 'SIM not Present' screen and that's as far as you'll get, which means it fails to be 'removable storage' by any sensible definition. Calling it removable storage would make your computer's hard drive removable storage - sure, you *can* remove it, but not if you want your device to function properly.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Jesus, has anyone actually read the patent? It is not a patent for a smartphone, it is a patent for a smartphone-like personal protection device.
"The entertainment and communication device also includes various emergency features for use by the person carrying the device. An alarm button 123 is provided and may be activated to produce an audible alarm from the speaker 125 for dissuading an attacker or intruder or activating a silent alarm whereby the cellphone is automatically operated to communicate the emergency condition to a remote telephone, such as by dialing "911" or a private security telephone number or the like. Similarly, one or more sensors 110, such as motion, infrared, ultrasonic, acceleration, sound, light, heat, smoke, carbon monoxide, poisonous gas or the like sensors, are provided with the device 100 and selectively activated for providing either an audible or silent alarm, similar to the functions of the panic alarm button 123 but without requiring operator activation, and the sensors 110 are connected through the sensor reading section 111 to the microprocessor 112 for using any of the functions of the device 100. For example, with the acceleration sensor of sensors 110 activated while a person has the device 100 in an automobile, the sudden deceleration of the automobile in an accident condition would be sensed by the acceleration sensor to cause the microprocessor 112 to dial an appropriate telephone number stored in the dialing memory 113, such as a "911" or a vehicle rescue number, and transmit the emergency as well as the location of the device 100 as determined by a global positioning satellite (GPS) reading section 117 provided with the device, which GPS reading section 117 may also be activated by the panic alarm 123. Further, if the motion sensor or similar sensors 110 are activated and the device 100 is appropriately positioned, for example in a hotel room, the motion and/or presence of an intruder will be sensed and communicated through the sensor reading section 111 to the microprocessor 112 to activate any desired function, such as an audible alarm from the speaker 125, an automatic dialing of a "911" number, operation of electronic camera 102 or infrared camera 106, operation of the microphone 103, operation of the GPS reading section 117 or the like. Similar functions can be performed by the device 100 when any of the other sensors are activated to sense a particular condition, such as heat, smoke, carbon monoxide, poisonous gas or the like. AM/FM radio receivers can optionally be included for entertainment when the alarm system is not in use. The alarm and radio function components can be mounted on the same printed circuit board within housing 100 or on separate circuit boards."
Lemelson.
Didn't he patent submarine patents?
Didn't that help change the rules with respect to when the exclusivity/patent lifetime clock started ticking?
Before this line of reasoning goes too far, won't somebody please think of the shareholders? All they wanted to do was to fund an organization without doing do-diligence to make certain that their money wasn't being used to harm others. What's wrong with that?
Seriously though, I've always been a fan of the "too fucking bad" legal principle. I forget though, did we get that one from English Common law?
Nothing but a bunch of greedy underhanded money grubbing lawyers have been turned out by one of our prestigious schools looking for that ever illusive cash-cow! They now think they've found one.
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Hey man, my hard drives are hot swappable.
I think removable is more about the ease of removing than being optional. You could not start some early computers without a floppy inserted but that doesn't make the floppy less removable.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I expect these people will be killed by someone trying to steal their BlackBerry.
If you introduced any of these ideas as your own to the average consumer, they'd think you were a genius, and be sure that you invented them.
That's what a patent troll does. Try to pretend that they invented something when they clearly did not, using that exact same methodology.
And FWIW, shouldn't a patent clerk know more than an "average consumer" - seeing as how they're on the receiving end of most of the cutting edge technology in patent form in the first place?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
CEO John Ki Kim hopes you keep Minerva Industries in your prayers!
"You talkin' shit?" -- krapper
That's okay, you still have a chance. I don't think you'll get too many claims of prior art.....
-Tavis
Many smartphones allow the phone side of things to be disabled, and should be able to work in non-phone mode without a SIM. My Treo 650 certainly allows that - in fact you can hotplug the SIM.