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?

[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?

[MaskedSlacker]

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

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.