Patent Troll Goes After Notebook Cooling

An anonymous reader writes "If you are manufacturing notebooks and you are using hardware that needs to be cooled down occasionally, you may be in the crosshairs of IPventure, which claims patent rights to an approach that is common in all notebooks today. For now, the company appears to be establishing its case by suing Fujitsu and Lenovo over the use of its invention in the Lifebook and Thinkpad series of products."

Comments

Submarine patent?

[betterunixthanunix]

So the method is common in notebooks today... meaning it has been in wide use for at least a few years now. The patent holder just waited until everyone had committed to selling that design, so that they could just sue everyone. Submarine patent tactics if I ever saw them.

Re:Submarine patent?

[shentino]

All this "treble damages" stuff for people who willfully infringe is so onesided.

There should be penalties for patent holders who willfully allow infringement in the name of increased damages.

Re:Submarine patent?

[c 0xFF]

FTFA:

The company claims that two patents are affected. Patent 7,506,190, awarded in March 2009, and patent 7,937,599, awarded in May of this year. Both patents describe “thermal and power management for computer systems.”

While this clearly has been a novel approach, it is questionable if it was novel when the original patent claimed by IPventure was filed on June 22, 2007 and there may be a good chance that prior art could invalidate both of its patents.

It's almost the opposite, actually. They sued almost as soon as one of the patents was awarded.

On the other hand, the older of the two was filed in 2007, while SpeedStep was introduced on the Pentium III in about 2000 or 2001. What their patents describe is essentially the thermostat logic: step down frequency when the temperature gets too hot. Surely that idea has existed from the introduction of dynamic frequency scaling?!?

But, the patents also talk about fan speed control ... I'm pretty sure that was the whole point of AMD's Cool'n'quiet.

Re:Submarine patent?

[jamesh]

My understanding is that patent examiners simply go off the information that's filed alongside the patent. If a patent isn't really novel, they wait until a re-examination request comes in - usually as a result of litigation around the patent.

A penalty for deliberately trying to mislead the patent examiners would go a long way towards resolving this problem...

Re:Submarine patent?

[udippel]

If there was booze and hookers in a patent office, I'd probably still be working there ... .
At least when I was there, it wasn't the officers being keen on granting, actually. At least the large majority wasn't. It was the bean-counters in higher management. Only a granted patent 'produces' more income in form of fees, renewal fees, and so forth. A rejected patent doesn't, except of the initial examination fee.

Do not always try to blame the poor officers. Try looking at capitalism instead. An office like the patent office ought to be financed by the tax payer, yes, the tax payer, to provide unbiased services. Services in the best interest of the country, that is the tax payer. It should not need to create its own funding, nor be used to create additional cash-flow into the coffers of the state / government.
In case of the latter two, there will always be politicians in higher position to 'expedite' this cash-flow and that needs granted patents, not rejections.
Plus, the applicants want patents. Look left and right, and you see many who'd be proud to have one. In our days, you might even need one or more for a position, a tenure, etc. And don't forget the courts who at times create case law that is not necessarily based on sound engineering facts.
Again, the disease is not in the office, it is a societal disease of prioritizing monetary gains at all cost anywhere.
 

Re:Submarine patent?

[Jerry]

"upheld by the courts"

A sober thought when one considers that US Supreme Court ruled last year that a corporation could bribe our elected representatives with as much money as would get their special legislation enacted, and there didn't have to be any accounting to anyone as to how much or to whom. These bribes are euphemistically called "campaign donations", but if the politician retires s/he can convert those funds to private use.

Re:Submarine patent?

[Dachannien]

There is a penalty. It's called the doctrine of laches, and it essentially says that if someone's behavior was damaging to you, but you opted to wait an unreasonable time before suing so that more damages would accrue, then you may forfeit the right to collect some or all of the compensation to which you would otherwise be entitled.

Now, it doesn't always work, because it's an affirmative defense, which means the defendant bears the initial burden to show that the plaintiff slept on their rights when they could have sued earlier. Some defendants look at that risk and opt to settle instead of trying it out on a jury.

Re:Submarine patent?

[MaskedSlacker]

Uh ... if they willfully allow it, it isn't rape. That's the correct (albeit, still stupid) analogy here.

Re:Submarine patent?

[russotto]

There should be penalties for patent holders who willfully allow infringement in the name of increased damages.

There should be even bigger penalties for patent holders who acquire obvious BS patents and try to make a fortune off of them. I'm thinking start with "death" and go up from there.

Re:Reading the article...

[c 0xFF]

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/06/23/1419230/USPTO-Rejects-Many-of-Oracles-Android-Claims

Not all of the patents have been overturned yet, mind you, but the case isn't looking good for Oracle.

I think there's two reasons you don't hear of this happening: first, I think a lot of companies just settle out of court instead of going through the mess. Second, and more significantly, I think it has to be a high-profile case with companies that Slashdot cares about (such as Google).

One key problem with patents

[h1q]

is that there is no adversarial position, as in a civil or criminal lawsuit.

This means there is no effective counterpoise to the seeker of the frivolous patent, since the patent office itself has nothing to lose from rank incompetence.

An attorney team whose reward is correlated with the number of patents it gets dismissed or invalidated would be quite interesting.

Then we need to work on the broad strokes of varying patentable periods depending on the field at hand. Drugs, software, and shoes probably ought to be patentable for differing periods of time.

Original Purpose of patents (U.S. version)

[Attila Dimedici]

If one looks at the wording of the U.S. Constitution and some of the writings of the time on patents, the purpose of patents in U.S. law is to encourage people to make their inventions known (rather than keeping them as trade secrets). Looked at in this way puts a somewhat different interpretation on "obviousness". If you make something and it is obvious how you did it, it fails the obviousness test. There is no advantage to society from giving you a patent, someone else can duplicate what you have done even if you never tell anyone how you did it.

Re:Original Purpose of patents (U.S. version)

[Dachannien]

Obviousness was one of several patent concepts that arose from the Progress Clause but that wasn't originally a part of the statute. Instead, it was formed as a judicial doctrine that viewed obviousness as contrary to the limits on the patent system in the Progress Clause (in the 1850 Supreme Court case Hotchkiss v. Greenwood).

The concept of obviousness, along with the general guideline of "obvious to one having ordinary skill in the art", was later incorporated into the statute. In fact, many of the patent eligibility requirements were originally formulated by the courts and later adopted by Congress.