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Google Patents Telling Time
theodp writes "Will Google's battle against Microsoft and Apple over their use of 'bogus' patents result in greater scrutiny of its own IP holdings? Take Google's new patent on 'Electronic Shipping Notifications' (please!), which might pique the interest of Amazon.com, UPS, the USPS and others in the shipping business, since providing customers with guesstimates of what time The King of Queens will show up at their door with Christmas presents could now constitute patent infringement. From the patent: 'The broker sends an electronic message, such as an email or text message, to the customer prior to the estimated shipment arrival time to inform the customer of the impending arrival. The customer can thus arrange for someone to be at the shipping address to receive the shipment at the estimated arrival time.' To help the USPTO understand its invention, Google supplied this diagram."
Chill. It's Google doing this, so it must be okay.
These are not the absurdly obvious patents you are looking for.
#DeleteChrome
No! That means no more pizza tracking from Dominoes!!! :-(
From the supplied (extremely complex) diagram I can see that Google put a great deal of effort into this. Looks like Google is finally learning to play the silly patent game like the rest of corporate America.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
telling time... really? this patent thing is going WAY out of line
Maybe now Apple with think twice about suing Google for selling a mobile OS that's better than the iPhone.
Defensive patents are an important weapon in the war against iFascism.
too many cookie requests! so to screw them back, here's the article for all that its worth:
Google’s battle against Microsoft and Apple over their use of “bogus” patents promises to result in greater scrutiny of its own intellectual property holdings. And we have a hunch that Amazon.com, UPS, the U.S. Postal Service and pretty much everyone else in the shipping business will be highly interested in this new addition to Google’s portfolio.
The search giant this week was awarded a patent on electronic shipping notifications, of all things. Here’s the abstract, explaining the approach.
A broker facilitates customer purchases from merchants. Shippers ship shipments containing the purchases from merchants to the customers. A shipper identifies a shipment using a shipment identifier. The broker uses the shipment identifier to obtain the status information for the shipment from the shipper. The broker analyzes the status information in combination with other information to calculate an estimate of the time that the shipment will arrive at the customer’s address. The broker sends an electronic message, such as an email or text message, to the customer prior to the estimated shipment arrival time to inform the customer of the impending arrival. The customer can thus arrange for someone to be at the shipping address to receive the shipment at the estimated arrival time.
Of course, the real test is whether Google will assert the patent against anyone who does something similar, as Microsoft and Apple are doing against Android with their own patents.
In the meantime, we’ll be left scratching our heads over the need to patent something like this.
man, last time I leave cookies enabled on FF's prefbar. sheesh! I had forgotton how NASTY some sites really are.
fuck them. so here's the text - no need to visit their damned site.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
"Illustrating absurdity by being absurd." - a phrase commonly used by Rush Limbaugh.
Excuse me while I go patent running water.
Telephone systems are electronic. Calling up the customer by phone and telling them you'll be there around 3pm is therefore delivering an electronic message. There's prior art, but getting the messenger service or the pizza or the cable repair guy to actually show up around 3pm is a bit more tricky.
The diagram was "Page 6 of 6" and showed steps 610-616 - perhaps the useful and novel part of the patent was in steps 1-500?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
... they are doing this to prove a point about the patent landscape. If that is the case, I'd call it a success. The more people are exposed to how grossly fucked the USPTO is the more aware of how frivolous all these IP lawsuits truly are.
perhaps the useful and novel part of the patent was in steps 1-500?
Perhaps. But where's the non-obvious part?
They see me trollin', they hatin'.
Anybody want my mod points?
Google has succeeded in patenting the act of estimating when a package will get somewhere. If this doesn't make people think "hmm maybe patents aren't such a good idea" then I don't know what will
I just about think that making abuse of the system extremely obvious is the only way to get lawmakers to recognize there is something wrong. If I were Google, I'd file as many bogus patents as I possibly could and bring to attention the fact you can patent the process of making toast.
Well, now we know why we can never a package on time from anybody. It is because Google Patented the ETA system for package delivery.
Sounds to me like Google is playing the system as it is currently designed to be played - but with a different intent. I hope they continue to file for more and more ridiculous patents until the real patent trolls (or, more importantly, the government) have nothing left but to call for reform.
"Careful! We don't want to learn from this!" -Calvin & Hobbes
called me on their phone/smart phone about making sure someone was at the house for my last two orders from Dell.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
This is about as close as I've seen to a "System for accomplishing a well known task with a computer".
This patent sounds like complete rubbish. I'm pretty sure that FedEx and several other companies have been giving me an estimate as to when my parcel will arrive for some number of years.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
FYI: I've done a cut and paste below of the broadest independent claim (this is what the patent covers, not the title or the figure that's cited). To infringe this claim, you would have to do every one of these steps:
1. A method of providing notification of impending delivery of a shipment shipped by a shipper to a shipping address specified by a customer, comprising:
periodically querying, by a broker computer system independent of the shipper and a merchant and which enabled the customer to purchase an item contained in the shipment from the merchant, a shipper computer system to obtain status information for the shipment with each query, wherein a periodic query of the shipment computer system comprises:
requesting status information from the shipper computer system by providing a shipment identifier of the shipment to the shipper computer system; and
receiving status information in response thereto;
responsive to status information obtained with a periodic query indicating an estimated delivery date for the shipment, halting, by the broker computer system, the periodic queries and scheduling the restart of periodic queries of the shipper computer system a day prior to the estimated delivery date;
restarting, by the broker computer system, periodic queries of the shipper computer system the day prior to the estimated delivery date to obtain updated status information with each query;
responsive to updated status information obtained with a periodic query indicating that the shipment is out for delivery to the customer, halting, by the broker computer system, the periodic queries and calculating an estimated delivery time for the shipment based at least in part on the status information; and
sending, by the broker computer system, an electronic message including the estimated delivery time to the customer.
This is Google poking fun at the patent office. They probably have hundreds of these in the pipeline, all with the same purpose: find out "How stupid a patent can you get?"
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Software patents are patently ridiculous. When I worked for a subsidiary of Microsoft, I was harassed (it's how I felt, being interrupted from writing code for what I perceived as silliness) into helping finding any angle in the code which could be turned into a patent, and to help with the serious-sounding language to describe the patent. I'm ashamed my name is out there attached to silly laughable software patents which purpose is just to perform the obvious.
We've had such package tracking in use for YEARS. Now, all of a sudden, someone can patent it? I wonder who will patent the wheel? How about a patent on picking one's nose or walking across a street? Aren't there rules that prevent such absurdity? Or is the entire patent office about as incompetent as the White House?
then I'm grabbing some popcorn. After being disgusted by the past few months of patent abuse I can't help but be very amused by this. If this is what I think this is then it is precisely the sort of thing I was hoping Google (or anybody for that matter) had up their sleeve. I can't wait to see what else is in the pipeline.
I'm afraid Google may have reached the tipping point. Companies generally start off with high goals and innovations, but they eventually degenerate into lumbering behemoths who's only goal is to squeeze every last penny out of their customers.
I'm pretty sure music players, touch screen phones, tablets, etc were all out far before apple tried their hands at it, and they're still the ones out suing other makers of said products.
...the life out of inventiveness.
Sadly in the current "patent" climate, everyone have to obtain as many patents as they possibly can, bogus and all, simply to have enough of a patent portfolio to scare off competitors who might try and quench competition, as we see ... well all of them do at the moment.
The best thing that could happen would be an immediate stop for new patents, and a permanent stop and revocation of all "software" patents.
But because it'll be the best thing to happen, it never will.
Looking at the actual patent, what they're doing is figuring out based on historical delivery information a more accurate estimated time of day for the delivery and sending an email to the recipient with that information *on the day of delivery*.
Basically it saves the recipient having to constantly check the tracking page for the courier.
Not earthshaking, but more than is currently offered.
I do believe that the sentiment you express here is exactly what Google are hoping the patent office, lawmakers, etc, will finally realize. It's what I first thought when I read it. I also believe they already have a list of examples prepared when they get challenged on this new patent. I also think they will also patent all kinds of other silly things real soon. The sillier the better. The system is broken, clearly, and perhaps they think that if they lean on it a little it will come crashing down. Here's to hoping.
For those that are so quick to jump on Google about this (which I suppose is understandable these days), you would hope that one would actually read the patent, or understand that the only important part of a patent is the claims, NOT the abstract or diagram provided. Yes, Google has patented providing delivery notifications...but the important, relevant question is HOW it calculates and provides those notifications. For, example, Google has decided that it is more efficient to, during shipment, halt the queries to the shipper's computer system until the day before the expected delivery date, then resume so as to provide up-to-date notifications. It has also claimed analyzing historical data of shipping routes and times to determine, down to the minute (theoretically) estimates of an arrival time, not based on what the shipper says, but what it has demonstrated in the past. Finally, UPS or other shippers could not possibly infringe because the patent clearly provides for a "broker" computer, which is explicitly not the shipper's computer, to query the shipper's database. The point is that Google has a novel idea here, and has defined it as such. Boiled down to its essence, it provides shipping notifications just like others do. But ice and a/c units both cool air, coffee cups and vases both hold liquid, dial-up and cable both provide access to the internet. The method is what is important, not the end result. To infringe a patent, one has to infringe on all claims. While some claims may be obvious, it is the (sometimes few) non-obvious ones that actually matter. Google has provided some of those non-obvious, novel claims (at least it appears to have) and it seems to have a valid patent.
Because it's not the same thing. What you see on UPS's website when you provide your tracking code and what Google is claiming is actually different.
Not that I support this patent.
We've had such package tracking in use for YEARS.
This patent was actually filed in 1952, according to a Google search.
See this method of exercising a cat. Sun had internal competitions to get the most ridiculous patent. I have heard rumors that other companies had similar practices back in the 90's. Of course that's not their official policy, but the employees joke around about it.
Patents don't have to be defended in order to maintain their status. Google could hold this patent purely as a defense mechanism. i.e. don't complain when Joe's Pizza uses it, unless Joe decides to hit Google with a suit for infringing his patent on adding additional vowels to a logo in order to indicate quantities of something. Yup, the patents situation in the United States is fucking stupid.
Yes, absurd patents are absurd, but when you have people suing you using absurd patents *coughapplecough*, and absurd patents are how the US landscape is, then you file absurd patents too. This is only problematic if Google goes and attempts to use this to sue people with. There's mountains of absurd patents, and the vast majority only come into play as defense against trolls *coughapplecough*
Welcome to any Apple-themed post, except this time it's Google.
You didn't expect any of these armchair patent experts to actually *read* more than the headline before offering their infallible expert opinion, did you?
Also, hilarious that we have apologists out for Google too. When Apple patents something absurd it's "evil, greedy, anti-competitive", but when Google is perceived to do the same they are "doing it as a protest to put a spotlight on absurd patents". Nice hypocrisy, slashdot!
Excuse me, but what content did you supply that was not in the summary?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
"Hello? Mr. Smith? Will you be at home between 2pm and 5pm tomorrow? Excellent, you package will be delivered between those hours. Thank you."
Something which seems to be overlooked by most of the commenters is the fact that the human readable description of a patent does not define the patent. The part you need to read to really understand a patent is the claims. Some patents which seem fairly obvious when reading the title, and description of the patent are actually very narrow when looking at the claims. Other patents seem fairly narrow when reading the description whereas the claims are very broad.
I'm not a lawyer, so take the remaining parts of this part with a big grain of salt, but it seems as if there are fairly obvious way to work around this patent without infringing it. As I understand it, the independent claims are the most important parts of a patent. They are reproduced below for your enjoyment. Note that both claims discusses periodic queries. It seems likely that you wouldn't infringe the patent if you did away with the periodic queries and instead had the shipper computer notify you whenever it had new information available. (As a side effect, this would be less bandwidth and processor intensive, similar to how it is usually better to use IRQ driven I/O instead of polling based I/O in an operating system...)
In both independent claims they also discuss that the periodic queries are halted and restarted a day prior to the estimated delivery. If you never halted the periodic queries you may have another possibility of avoiding infringement.
Nevertheless, this seems fairly close to "System for accomplishing a well known task with a computer" as gstoddart mentioned in an earlier comment.
Independent claims:
"1. A method of providing notification of impending delivery of a shipment shipped by a shipper to a shipping address specified by a customer, comprising: periodically querying, by a broker computer system independent of the shipper and a merchant and which enabled the customer to purchase an item contained in the shipment from the merchant, a shipper computer system to obtain status information for the shipment with each query, wherein a periodic query of the shipment computer system comprises: requesting status information from the shipper computer system by providing a shipment identifier of the shipment to the shipper computer system; and receiving status information in response thereto; responsive to status information obtained with a periodic query indicating an estimated delivery date for the shipment, halting, by the broker computer system, the periodic queries and scheduling the restart of periodic queries of the shipper computer system a day prior to the estimated delivery date; restarting, by the broker computer system, periodic queries of the shipper computer system the day prior to the estimated delivery date to obtain updated status information with each query; responsive to updated status information obtained with a periodic query indicating that the shipment is out for delivery to the customer, halting, by the broker computer system, the periodic queries and calculating an estimated delivery time for the shipment based at least in part on the status information; and sending, by the broker computer system, an electronic message including the estimated delivery time to the customer. "
"11. A system for providing notification of impending delivery of a shipment shipped by a shipper to a shipping address specified by a customer, comprising: a computer processor; and a computer-readable storage medium storing computer program modules configured to execute on the computer processor, the computer program modules comprising: a shipper interface module for: periodically querying, by a broker independent of the shipper and a merchant and which enabled the customer to purchase an item contained in the shipment from the merchant, a shipper computer system to obtain status information for the shipment with each query, wherein a periodic query of the shipment computer system comprises: requesting status information from the shipper computer system by providing a shipment identifier of the shipment to the sh
... after seeing the term "guesstimates"
patent a business process... I wonder if anyone's patented the "wake up call" offered at hotels? * walks away mumbling to self * Muhahahahaha....
I was all with you, till you said "To infringe a patent, one has to infringe on all claims". That is actually not true.
It depends on how the patent is structured and how nice the court is when the patent is tried there (Hello Texas!).
For example, typically claim one says "Claimed is the same thing you all are used to, but with an improvement".
Then claim 2 says "The object of claim one, with yet another improvement", then claim 3 either says "The object of claim 2, with yet another improvement" or "The object of claim one, with yet another improvement".
Most of the time if you infringe on claim one, infringing is what you do.
Suppose claim one is bad. When tried in court, for some strange reason courts sometimes allow e.g. claim 2 to stand by itself, even if claim one is found to be obvious. So you can be found infringing on claim 2 even if claim one is a bad claim.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Why is it that people love the services provided by Google at no cost, due to advertising, but also find no qualms with the advertising encountered on cable television, a service which we directly pay for? I don't have cable, but everyone I know does, and I'm always curious why they have no complaint with essentially paying twice to watch the latest CSI. Once out of pocket, and once via advertisements.
Apple has been know to sue other companies to keep them out of their markets.
I have used it and it works. Based on past history and experience I can say with confidence and with scientific proof: The check is in the mail and will be there tomorrow.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It's called a track record. Until Google actually sues people with patents, I'm more inclined to be more forgiving on google especially since they are on the receiving end of all patent disputes so far.
Our patent system is broken, and you can't realistically not play by it's broken rules out in the real world. Until things change, defense patents are the only decent defense besides mountains of lawyers.
One drawback to the [pre-existing] system described above is that the status information is often not very precise. The status information might include an overly-conservative, and incorrect, delivery date prediction. Moreover, even if the delivery date prediction is correct, the status information does not provide the likely time of delivery. As a result, the person receiving the shipment must plan to remain at the delivery address for the entire day, or even for multiple days, or risk missing the delivery. This waiting can be extremely inconvenient for people who work or have other obligations that make it difficult to remain at the shipping address. One possible solution to this problem is to ship the item to the customer's work or to another address where someone is usually available to accept the shipment. However, this solution is not ideal for items that are difficult to transport.
This.
Claim 1 breaks down like this:
1. A method of providing notification of impending delivery of a shipment shipped by a shipper to a shipping address specified by a customer, comprising:
(a) periodically querying, by a broker computer system independent of the shipper and a merchant and which enabled the customer to purchase an item contained in the shipment from the merchant, a shipper computer system to obtain status information for the shipment with each query, wherein a periodic query of the shipment computer system comprises:
--requesting status information from the shipper computer system by providing a shipment identifier of the shipment to the shipper computer system; and
--receiving status information in response thereto;
(b) responsive to status information obtained with a periodic query indicating an estimated delivery date for the shipment, halting, by the broker computer system, the periodic queries and scheduling the restart of periodic queries of the shipper computer system a day prior to the estimated delivery date;
(c) restarting, by the broker computer system, periodic queries of the shipper computer system the day prior to the estimated delivery date to obtain updated status information with each query;
(d) responsive to updated status information obtained with a periodic query indicating that the shipment is out for delivery to the customer, halting, by the broker computer system, the periodic queries and calculating an estimated delivery time for the shipment based at least in part on the status information; and
(e) sending, by the broker computer system, an electronic message including the estimated delivery time to the customer.
If one does not do even one of these five elements, one doesn't infringe on the patent (well, there's the other independent claim 11 to review, too).
Before people get worked into a lather about the latest patent scandal, may I suggest that we all mentally add the phrases "A method of. . ." or "An apparatus for. . ." to the title of every patent we see? Because that's really what is meant.
The point is that Google has a novel idea here, and has defined it as such. [..] To infringe a patent, one has to infringe on all claims. While some claims may be obvious, it is the (sometimes few) non-obvious ones that actually matter. Google has provided some of those non-obvious, novel claims (at least it appears to have) and it seems to have a valid patent.
No, you need to infringe at least 1 of the claims. Not all of them. (You do need to infringe on all the elements in a single claim, though.)
Claim #1 here is absurdly generic. This is yet another example of the patent office granting a ridiculously obvious patent.
So then how is your comment modded to +5 informative? Can it be that here on Slashdot we are so pro-Google that we praise them for filing and receiving bogus patents? Please tell me it hasn't really come to that!
They just give them away.
To infringe a patent, one has to infringe on all claims.
Sorry, no. To infringe a patent, one has to infringe on any single one claim. That's why you split your concept in several claims, actually: so you can patent the very thing you invented by clearly exposing it (usually the last, most specific claim) but also similar ideas (the previous, more general claims).
How is this different from the delivery man who phones you up on the delivery day to say, "I'll be there about 2:00?" You're getting the notification on the day of delivery, and I'm sure he's taking historical information (his own experience) into account when generating the estimate. Ok, it's a human rather than a computer, but a human brain is functionally equivalent to a computer in this situation. Simply substituting an electronic computer for a biological one does not make something patentable. The electronic computer needs to be doing something fundamentally different from what the human was doing.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
and then sue the government for infringement.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
Mod parent up. I read the summary and thought "I've never had USPS or UPS notify me of an eta in advance." Seriously wish they would, then I wouldn't need these silly scripts that poll the tracking websites looking for changes.
Or maybe I'm just being entirely too naive.
Almost...It's more like a friend calling the delivery guy every few minutes, seeing how the progress is going, comparing that to historical data on the delivery guy's reliability, then, when your friend has determined the delivery time to an acceptable estimate, letting you know. This saves you a bunch of time, is much more precise, and much more efficient. Those benefits themselves potentially make this patentable more than any other reason.
The difference between Apple and Google with regards to patents is very obvious. Both companies own a gun but Google uses it for self defense while Apple uses it to go on a murder spree.
Somebody sympathetic has to be deliberately harmed. What have you got here? Nothing.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If google used their patents the way Apple does, you would have a point. As it stands, you don't.
When apple uses its patents to litigate against competition, placing ridiculous injunctions on popular products to ensure that consumers are never offered more choice than "Steve's way or other Steve's way," yes they are being greedy, monopolistic, evil, and anti-competitive pricks.
I would think the same of Google if they were to use their patents to crush or extort another company's attempt to enter the market.
Sorry, but at this point any software patent--and almost any other patent being granted today--is stupid (and by stupid, I mean not novel) to me. It doesn't matter if it's coming from Google, Apple, Microsoft, or some unknown company I haven't heard of.
I respect your attempt to bring another perspective to this story, but nothing you're mentioning seems novel enough to grant a patent. Halt queries until the day before the expected ship date? A third party providing estimates of shipping time based on the shipper's past behavior? Really? That's novel? That's what's worth a patent and lawsuits over? I could provide prior art in the form of numerous conversations over the phone with businesses over the years...
I love Google. I really do. But the patent system is fundamentally broken and needs to be overhauled. This is not the sort of thing the patent system was developed for.
We're headed for some seriously fucked up problems due to a patent system run amok. We're already there in many respects, but if something doesn't change soon, it will get even worse. Think 1984, but with corporations and threats of lawsuits occupying the role of Big Brother.
Well, not exactly.
When Apple uses some ridiculous patent to troll others out of business - then they are evil.
You can't say the same about Google. Not yet, anyway.
In today's news, Slashdot has obtained a patent for misleading article summaries and intentionally overblown headlines.
This patent involves honestly estimating when the package will arrive, you see, not just when the guy will show up with the slip saying he tried to deliver it, at the same moment when your doorbell miraculously fails to work, but only for him.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Seriously it's high time we abandon the patent system.
It does not work at all in the modern age.
How can you claim a patent on something against another party that didn't use anything of yours to create it?
In theory any of us could write a web service that does exactly what this patent describes completely from our own designs quite easily without any influence from Google... but then be liable to be sued by Google for patent violation. It's not possible to write software without violating patents these days as every basic idea is being patented constantly.
We need to free software from the burden of ridiculous patents, I'm fine with protecting someone's intellectual property but a generic idea that anyone can implement is not intellectual property.
you know, this stuff is volatile enough without the misleading headline.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The wheel has been done :)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn965-wheel-patented-in-australia.html
How about swinging on a swing?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2178-boy-takes-swing-at-us-patents.html
"We've had such package tracking in use for YEARS."
no, we haven't. I don't think anyone has won like this even today.
But, yeah be sure to let a bad summary to a poorly written article determine your opinion, otherwise you might have to think.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What they've come up with isn't non-obvious. Any group of experienced engineers can come up with this optimization. That's the litmus test and this fails. If you do extensive research on the properties of materials and build a super-strong alloy--OK. That's a patent. But if someone asked me to come up with a way to optimize notification times based on actual delivery, I and a bunch of people I know could come up with this without much struggle. Not appropriate for a patent. Just because Google was the first company to get the people controlling engineering time to sign-off on implementing this trivial solution, doesn't make it patent-worthy.
The patent system is broken and it's hurting our ability to innovate.
The only thing hilarious is your belief that Slashdot is one person's opinion.
And by hilarious, I mean Fucking Stupid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How will this patent acquirement go? Only time will tell.
The more you know, the more you have to say and the more you should listen.
I think you just missed the point of the joke, and by doing so became the living embodiment of it, along with the several other AC posts I got in response to this. You're the first one with the stones to actually log in.
You see, what I did (since you clearly didn't see it - I probably should have appended "did you see what I did there?" to the end of my original post) was to use a literary device called a "generalisation". This is often used, quite frequently in the company of hyperbole, to emphasise a point.
For example, "The buses are never, ever on time. You wait for hours and then three turn up at once" is an example of a generalisation combined with hyperbole. No one reading the sentence (unless lacking in basic reading comprehension) believes that the writer *literally* had to wait hours, or that his assertion that the busses are "never ever" on time was a literal statement.
Do you need me to help you with applying that to my post? I can break it down piece by piece with quotes and explain it as I go if it makes it easier, or do you have enough to go on from here on your own?
Concur -they may have something really cool. Trying to conduct estimation problems on large graphs >1 M nodes ( our road system), taking into account traffic, constraints, real time updates of actual location is really hard. Since this is a more complex traveling salesman problem it is AT LEAST NP Hard and that is for one shipment. Never mind trying to do those level of calculations on the computational scales that Google works at. The current issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems has some good articles about using mass scale computations for intelligent transportation. Lets see if instead of it being a package to get from point "a" to point "b", it was you in a car, this patent would potentially be valid. For all we know they have published the actual math's on how they do it is just doubtful that no more than a 100 people in the world could actually understand the concepts used to solve the problem.
So it is like taking a GPS navigation unit that bases arrival time on past traffic patterns (standard feature even on basic units for a few years now), type in the delivery addresses and notify when you are x minutes away according to the readout? Not much of an invention, IMHO.
"To infringe a patent, one has to infringe on all claims."
Wrong - you only need to be covered by one claim in a patent to infringe the whole patent. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_infringement#Elements_of_patent_infringement (2nd paragraph).
It would've been a hypocrisy if Google tried to sue at least half as many companies as Apple do now. Until Google becomes a true patent troll, there's a great distinction between these two companies from my point of view.
Why do you think it is okay for USA to hold the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world, while Iran is not allowed even to start a research in that direction? Is it a hypocrisy too?
It only means that if Google is going to sue, and they wouldn't do that would they?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
And do you realize that that is what is broken in software patents? You just write down some well through steps, one that anyone with a little bit common sense is able to think of, write "with a computer" and you have your patent.
A patent is something like a Otto-motor, a television, even a chair is more an invention then a software patent. A patent should be applied to something that actually have a physical form, not an idea. Maybe Google's idea is novel, but it's just some steps a computer can do, and as such an algorithm, and as such it's math.
In a patent of a physical process or a physical machine I have an implementation, that works. It's not just an idea. Where is the implementation, where is the source code? Ideas should not be patentable, if they would, we would stop any progress in science, literature, music and art.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
provides for a "broker" computer
Are you seriously trying to claim having a different person do exactly the same thing makes it "original"?
That's a ridiculously new level of "blah blah blah on the internet".
This idea is obvious and just shows how laughably bad the PTO's, and your, idea of non-obvious is. Are you being deliberately obtuse to the point of dishonesty?
If one does not do even one of these five elements, one doesn't infringe on the patent
Correction: that is a single claim, and to infringe on it you'd have to do all elements of the claim. If one does not do all of those elements, one doesn't infringe on the patent.
However, if one does do all of the elements of claim 1, the patent is violated even if claims 2-18 weren't violated.
Correction. . .
Yeah -- poor wording on my part. To infringe, one needs to perform all elements of a claim. What I was trying to emphasize is that to avoid infringement, one can do any four of the five elements of the claim, as long as one does not do the fifth: Infringement is a Boolean "and" operation. I was trying to point out that patent avoidance is usually easier than is thought, since one needs merely to find a claim element that one can do differently.
Thanks for the edit.
After looking at the diagram of the process flow, I think it's time for the grade schools to start creating process charts and patenting them. The schools could fund themselves with all the lawsuits they could bring to bear.
Who was harmed? Was the harm avoidable, or the lesser evil? Is the harmed entity sympathetic, or itself evil? Is the harm actual, or potential?
It's not evil to cut a hole in the devil, nor to choose the path of least harm. Collecting cutlery is not an expression of intent to become a slasher.
Help stamp out iliturcy.