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US ITC May Reverse Judge's Ruling In Kodak vs. Apple
An anonymous reader writes "Going after Apple and RIM, Kodak says, 'every digital camera and phone with a camera' infringes on its patents. A judge sided against Kodak in January, but now the US International Trade Commission has agreed to review the judge's decision. With the ITC's ability to block imports, Apple and RIM may have no choice but to fork over dough to Kodak in the event of an unfavorable decision. If the ITC can toss out court decisions like this, one wonders how much hope there is for patent reform. The patent in question is Patent Number 6292218: 'Electronic camera for initiating capture of still images while previewing motion images.'"
...the Judge's decision. I thought only an Appeals Court can do that, not an AGENCY of the Administration.
FTA: "ITC Judge Paul Luckern on Jan. 24 agreed with the companies on both issues." The first judge was a judge on the ITC. Essentially we have a judge reviewing his own court's decision. It's not like the ITC is trying to reverse a federal Court of Appeals or something along those lines.
Read the original article on bloomberg.com. It says
Apple and RIM denied infringing the patent and argued it was invalid. ITC Judge Paul Luckern on Jan. 24 agreed with the companies on both issues.
So it seems that the "ruling" was just an earlier finding of the same agency (and the Slashdot summary was misleading). Maybe Apple and RIM need to sue in regular court, then your question would apply.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Regular courts are too slow; by the time the final decision comes down it's moot or nearly so. So everything is effectively decided in the preliminary stages, whether via an ITC order to stop imports, or a TRO, or whatever. Once you've blocked the other guy's product, you just drag out the regular court proceedings until they cry uncle.
Because there is a mile of difference between an administrative law judge and an Article III Federal judge. One is an employee of the agency involved, essentially an "Article I" judge that is a member of the Executive branch. The other is a member of the Judicial branch. One is used within an agency to determine the agency's position on an issue. The other has the power to review agency decisions and to overturn them. The linked article is describing an internal appeal process within the agency prior to the agency developing a 'final' agency position.
As usual. The ITC doesn't decide whether there is patent infringement, they decide whether there is enough evidence of patent infringement so that a company should be stopped from importing things into the USA to stop them from infringing on patents. So they should only stop the most obvious cases. The patent dispute goes to court anyway, and if the ITC had stopped Apple from importing iPhones into the USA, and then it turned out that actually Apple hadn't infringed on any patents, then that would be some major problem.
And of course Kodak can ask the ITC to reconsider its decision. So they will look at the exact same evidence again. Now I don't know what the rules are for a decision of the ITC, but in a court judgement the ruling would only be changed if the first judge had made blatant errors. I'd think that is unlikely to happen.
I can not lay my hand on any part of the Union Constitution which gives the Executive branch power to act like the Judicial branch. Perhaps I don't understand the "ITC"'s location within the government, but it appears to me to be an unconstitutional organization.
As for the patent:
People at my Computer Users Group were taking digital photos with Commodore Amigas as early as 1985. I still have several of them stored away. That would be considered "prior art" right? So the patent should be invalidated.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Try actually reading the patent to find out what is actually patented. The title doesn't tell the whole story. Ever.
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So you're claiming that any system caught a still image on any device and could preview said picture while viewing a video feed should automatically invalidate the Kodak claim? I just want to back this up with asking if you looked over the specifics of the patent... They're not really the same thing. Kodak's system does what your system does, yes. But Kodak's system takes it further with specifics that were doubtlessly lacking in your video production unit of 1990. Note language like "single integrated circuit" and you should understand what I'm talking about.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I skimmed the patent 6292218 that was filed in 1997 and it might not be applicable to current cameras. It describes a camera with "a removable memory card", which many devices like iphone and ipad don't have. It also describes two separate processors, one for previews and one for the captured picture, and also a multiplexer that the display uses to select which image to display. I suspect current cameras don't have true separate "processors", rather just a flag in firmware to decide what to do. However, in 1997 this kind of processing probably needed to be done separately. The patent was issued in 2001, so I'm not sure why Kodak waited 10 years on this.
How does making it a single integrated circuit pass the obviousness test?
Personally, and patent that is just another, prior, patent where the words "on or with a [computer|network|integrated circuit]" tacked on the end should be thrown out as obvious, because that doesn't fulfill the original purposes of the patent system but these days I guess that's just me.
I can not lay my hand on any part of the Union Constitution which gives the Executive branch power to act like the Judicial branch. Perhaps I don't understand the "ITC"'s location within the government, but it appears to me to be an unconstitutional organization.
The ITC is an Article I court or "legislative court," so-called because they are created by an act of Congress. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of Article I courts, at least when certain constraints are in place (e.g. their rulings must be reviewable by a regular Article III court). "[I]t long has been settled that Article 3 does not express the full authority of Congress to create courts, and that other articles invest Congress with powers in the exertion of which it may create inferior courts and clothe them with functions deemed essential or helpful in carrying those powers into execution." Ex parte Bakelite Corp., 279 U.S. 438 (1929). "Article III does not confer on litigants an absolute right to the plenary consideration of every nature of claim by an Article III court." Commodity Futures Trading Com'n v. Schor, 478 U.S. 833 (1986). Assigning limited adjudicatory functions to Article I courts is "consistent with Art. III, so long as the essential attributes of the judicial power are retained in the Art. III court, and so long as Congress' adjustment of the traditional manner of adjudication can be sufficiently linked to its legislative power to define substantive rights." Northern Pipeline Constr. Co. v. Marathon Pipe Line Co., 458 US 50 (1982).
There are tons of Article I courts, including the ITC, Bankruptcy Courts, Tax Courts, courts-martial, the Patent Office's Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences and Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. Decisions of the ITC are reviewable by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and from there the US Supreme Court.
Odd. I always thought that a specific process done by specific hardware qualified as a patent. But since you obviously have no interest in expounding on your claims I guess there isn't much to discuss.
You have always thought wrong then. Just because a specific process is done on new hardware doesn't mean it's not *still the same process*. If that were the case, then you could say since I have this piece of software that runs on ARM and the same software that runs on x86, there should be two different patents. That's not the case, otherwise Java and any interpreted language would have a major problem.
The problem with Kodak's patent in this particular instance is almost every part of the patent has prior art. There may be a couple line items that don't have prior art, but you can't patent a multi-line patent based off of only one or two changes... because again, I could twiddle a few things in how an iPhone works and then start selling an iPhone. Apple would probably have a problem with this.
A patent has to be *significantly* new/different to be a new patent. In Kodaks case with this patent, it's not significantly new or different than existing products.
Thinking about this case made me realize why patents are a bad idea. And the problem with patents have to do with the scarcity of invention ... or lack of thereof.
Patents give inventors monopoly over their invention, even if other people come up with the same idea independently.
One of the main assumptions justifying this is that invention is scarce. Coming up with an invention requires either a rare original idea which is hard to come by, some special insight that only few brilliant people would have, or a tremendous amount of effort that only few would be willing to spend on developing such an invention.
If inventions are indeed rare, then the benefit of encouraging innovation by giving such monopolistic power to the inventor, and making it safe for the inventor to publish the invention and license it to others is greater than the damage caused by such monopoly. If invention is easy to come by, on the other hand, such monopolistic power stifles innovation rather than foster it.
If you look at most patents, even the better ones, where there is no issue of prior art, most of them are solutions that are easy to come by. They may not be immediately obvious, but if you take any reasonably experienced engineer and give him a few months to work on this problem, they would come up with a solution, and probably a similar solution. With thousands of qualified engineers in each area and hundreds of companies that benefit from such inventions, it no longer makes sense to protect them with patents.
Patentable inventions are supposed to be "non-obvious", but this doesn't solve the problem. Even if the USPTO made a better job of filtering out obvious inventions (more than the lousy job they're doing right now), we'll still have all these patents where the solution is not immediately obvious but are the kind of invention that any qualified engineer could come by. And because this is true for most inventions, and because there is no clear criteria for distinguishing between the true "high quality" and the lower quality patents, I think we are better off by eliminating patents in most areas altogether.
You must be knew here. If it isn't literally in the US Constitution and mean what the poster wants it to mean it's clearly unconstitutional.