Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Try actually reading the patent to find out what is actually patented. The title doesn't tell the whole story. Ever.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
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.
Yep. This is why I've said before that the simplest and easiest patent reform would be a rule saying that if any claim in a patent is found to be invalid, then the whole patent is invalid. It wouldn't prevent all patent trolling, of course, but it would provide a powerful incentive for patent holders not to sue over "infringements" that are clearly nothing of the sort in any reasonable person's eyes. Over the long term, it would produce patents for actual specific inventions rather than "hey, I've got a neat idea, let's patent it and sue anyone who does something vaguely similar."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.