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Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google Chase 'Got Milk?' Patents
theodp writes "Among the new iOS 5 features is Reminders, which Apple explains this way: 'Say you need to remember to pick up milk during your next grocery trip. Since Reminders can be location based, you'll get an alert as soon as you pull into the supermarket parking lot.' But does Reminders infringe on a newly-granted patent to Amazon for Location Aware Reminders, which covers the use of location based reminders to remind a user 'to purchase certain items such as, for example, as milk, bread, and eggs'? Or could Reminders run afoul of Google's new patent for Geocoding Personal Information, which covers triggering a voice reminder or making a computing device vibrate when a user approaches a location if 'one of the user's events is a task to pick up milk and bread'? Not to be left out of the 'Got Milk?' patent race, Apple also has a patent pending for Computer Systems and Methods for Collecting, Associating, and/or Retrieving Data, which covers providing a reminder to a user whose 'to do' list includes 'get milk' when the user's location matches 'a store that sells the item "milk."' (Continues, below.)
theodp continues: "That should not be confused with Microsoft's pending patent for Geographic Reminders, which allows users to specify reminders such as 'pick up milk if I am within a ten minutes drive of any grocery store.' That all four tech giants chose to pursue remember-the-milk patents — and the USPTO is considering and granting them — is all the more remarkable considering that Microsoft suggested location-based reminders were obvious in a 2005 patent filing, which informed the USPTO that 'a conventional reminder application may give the user relevant information at a given location, such as 'You're near a grocery store, and you need milk at home.' So much for that immediate patent quality improvement promised by the America Invents Act!"
To the strongest lawyers go the spoils
This is where out US patent group, judicial branch, executive branch, I don't know who exactly, needs to step in and say "YOU DID NOT INVENT REMINDING PEOPLE TO DO STUFF!" and prevent these companies from spending (wasting) money and time on winning the patent to do it. Their struggle to win that patent is not value adding for the country in any way whatsoever, but they'll do it anyway for their own gain. It's wasted money that could better go into R&D, for example.
So tell them now, level the field... and prevent all that wasted effort.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
How exactly does one get a patent on location-based reminders? I know I'm not the only one who has considered that idea and the actual implementation should be fairly straightforward (when you consider that APIs and hardware required for it all exist, hell even if you go the "IN THE CLOUD" route it would be relatively easy to figure out (Track position constantly, periodic "pings" to "The Cloud" that pass along your approximate coordinates, in return you get a JSON/XML reply with any nearby reminder positions which are cached locally, if/when you are close enough to a reminder position your device reminds you, new reminders are automagically submitted to the same "Cloud server", for local storage you just skip "The Cloud" and store everything locally)).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
We are already all criminals anyway in one way or another. Why not just ignore these patents and keep living life? We're the peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Grab the Patent Lawyers and get them to Battle Royale fight to the death over the patent.
It'll be almost as much as fair and the world could use a few less of them.
So now a location-based reminder is a fucking patentable thing? What's next, a patent on something that remembers phone numbers for you?
This shit has got to stop...
Should such obvious, humanly logical things be patented at all? What if someone patents, say, "To submit form press OK." The whole civilization may stop.
Someone discovered you can make money much easier if you suffocate the competition using the law than producing better products.
I'd like to say I hope that we get some kind of patent reform which fixes all of this, but to be honest I don't understand it well enough to state with any confidence what needs to happen. IANAPL. Can someone who is shed some light on what would need to happen for this quagmire to end?
I don't need a reminder on what to get, I need a reminder on what I forgot to get. Let's say I'm baking bread and I put down that I need flour. However, I forgot that used up my yeast when I last baked two weeks ago and I forgot to put that down on my list. The "you forgot to get" feature would look at my past purchasing history and tell me, hey you might want to check if you have enough yeast since you last purchased yeast 6 months ago. Maybe even it could see if a phone is currently located in the house where you live, is one of your families phones and send a text message asking them to check and see if there is any yeast in the cupboard.
However, I really think a majority of software patents are STUPID and COMPLETELY FUCKING OBVIOUS.
Someone in a position of authority in Government has got to wake up and say STOP! This shit has gone so far beyond ridiculous, I doubt that there is a word or phrase to describe it other than FUBAR. (Change the meaning of "R" from recognition to recovery)
this sure seems to reek of obvious. The fact that multiple companies are racing to patent essentially the same thing--which is just seemingly logical extension of an existing idea (reminders)--seems to underscore that.
Right now, you can patent anything, and if you can get it past the USPTO, you're a winner: you can collect royalties as long as you keep your demands below what it would cost to strike down your patent. There is almost no risk or downside (at worst, you lose what you paid for getting the patent, maybe $10k).
Since lawyers are ultimately driving this, maybe we can fix it by giving lawyers an incentive: create laws that allow companies to be sued for damages if they obtain patents if they should reasonably have known about prior art. This might restore some balance to the patent system, and companies would think twice about filing bad patents if they incur potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in liability.
Since they are all so similar, wouldnt it make sense to deny ALL of them?
Excuse me. The idea to combine geographic positions with specific messages to the user is *not new*.
What you forgot to get= what you should get (as in these patents)-what you have got (trivial information)
... it makes my (remaining) hair hurt just thinking about how stupid this "patent race" is becoming.
-- john
And the only reason that this hasn't been patented in the past is that nobody honestly believed that the USPTO could be so freaking stupid. Boy did we underestimate THAT...
Some billboards are art. Pretty sure they're location based too.
rewriting history since 2109
The more interesting data mining is currently implemented as trade secrets. Apparently, the credit card companies can predict, with 99% accuracy, if you are going to get a divorce within the next two years.
They could do useful little tricks like reminding you about the yeast at the checkout counter, but that would be creepy to most people and not as profitable for the company with the data.
Any time an exceedingly obvious patent is filed by a company, it should be immediately placed in the public domain, and the company that filed it should be forced to pay royalties to the government. Not only would this reduce the amount of stupid patent filings and court battles, it would get our national debt paid off within a year or two.
Nice.
Actually my girlfriend suggested a variant:
Since you may go to one store for milk, and a different store - where milk is more expensive - for something the milk store doesn't have, how about an app that DOESN'T remind you to get milk when you're at the other store.
In other words, I'm going to patent an app that doesn't remind you to get something when you're not at the right place.
With all those apps out there not reminding users, I should be able to sue for billions!!
or is this just a kind of prior art? It simply does not make sense to allow patents for such simple things. Is geo-caching violating location aware reminders?
So if you're looking for prior art to go patent busting on these big companies, a good place to start would be in the wearable computer projects in the 90's. A lot of these guys published in the journal of the ACM, too. Apple, Google and Amazon think their balls are all shiny and they're doing something new, but they're not.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm turning GPS off right now!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Microsoft, Google, Apple and Amazon will likely eventually just cross license each other and keep the wannabes out, at least for the U.S. market (don't know about foreign patents issued).
I see a lot of bitching with respect to patents, but without patents we would not have seen the 19th & 20th century rise of the U.S. in mechanical and electrical and electronic invention.
A society where everything is kept a Trade Secret means that few people are willing to disclose or trade information. Patents only give you a limited time right to exclusive use IF, and only when, you disclose the invention in its entirety via the patent, so others can duplicate it, invent around it or improve it. It is a magically simple solution to the older age of "guilds" where you often had to be born into the guild to be a person who could become skilled in the trades.
I can't take it anymore! What has become of this planet?
Please do not confuse USA with the rest of the world!
I thought patents were based on the method and not the product/service in and of itself. Everyone could implement their method slightly differently (that's the trick part) and be scot-free.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
You assume there is a trade secret which is worthy to be disclosed.
This is not the case when there are 100.000s of equally able engineers and software developers.
Also this is not the case when the patent is generalized so much in order to earn more money that it is hard to detect any implementation apart from the idea.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Forget "skilled in the art" even lay people found this obvious! I remember many years ago thinking that if my GPS knew where I was it would seem logical that it could also tell me what to do when I was there. Later I was frustrated that my PDA had calendar, to-do list, and GPS, and yet had no way of combining the three of them. I'm technologically inclined, but I'm certainly not "skilled in the art" of making phones/GPSs/PDAs/etc.
Military systems have been providing location based alerting to soldiers for decades now.
This behavior is perpetrated by the corporate executives who don't want any businesses to be able to compete. The lawyers are gun, but the executives are the hand that fires it.
Sadly, you need to patent that shit, man or we'll be hearing about it in a years time.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
. I'm going to take out a patent on Claim 1. Executing logic and probability calculations in a computing machine,
Claim 2. Representing objects or aspects of reality, and in particular physical objects in spatiotemporal situation-types using binary numeric symbols. and
Claim 3. Applying the logic and probability calculations of claim 1. to the symbolic representations o claim 2 in order to have the computing machine discover significant associations between physical objects of different types in different stereotypical recurring situation types.
That should cover all questions about milk and other comestibles.
And I'm going to license it royalty free in perpetuity, because otherwise I would be embarrassed at patenting such an obvious use of Turing / Von Neumann / Babbage's technology.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Assuming it will point out the closest gun store on the way to the patent attorney's office.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Note that Visa flat-out denied it. Which is unusual; usually there's a mealy-mouthed denial or a refusal to admit or deny it.
Also, the banks don't usually know what you bought, only where you bought it. This makes such precision a little harder. That's why there's 'loyalty cards'.
How do you patent what basically is a fucking grocery store shopping list that has been used for ever?
How do you patent what every family has been doing for years? Which is simply calling to remind their child, their wife, their husband... to pick up some eggs and milk.
This fucking world needs to hurl itself into the sun.
Takes effect on the Ides of March, 2012. For new filings after date. Those new filings will start to come out of the Patent Office mill around 2017. Most professionals in the patent field (including me) don't think the new law will change patent practice much.
Like many others in my field, I prefer to call it by its original name, the "Smith-Leahy Act," since it, disappointingly, doesn't provide meaningful improvement in "inventing."
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
Patents were invented to make trade secrets public for the betterment of society - for example some enterprising engineer comes up with a method for making super strong steel - just looking at the end result doesn't give you any clue and if the engineer kept it as a trade secret the method might go with her to her grave - thus hurting society. She taking out a patent means that society gets to learn how to do it and she is rewarded for sharing by getting extra compensation from licensing the patent to other engineers.
Location-based reminders is not a significant advance by that definition.... and should not be patentable IMHO. All the necessary patentable advances were in the GPS system etc upon which this simple and obvious idea is built. Makes me sick how much this system is abused.
Doesn't it feel like almost every societal tool has been switched into reverse these days?
Robert.
I'm glad phones are finally getting smart. I've been waiting for years for my phone to be smart enough to turn itself off when I go into a theater, and more importantly, turn itself back on after I leave. That someone can patent ideas as simple as this is proof that the patent system needs large bombs dropped on it until there is nothing left.
http://www.notmilk.com/
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
I don't need a reminder on what to get, I need a reminder on what I forgot to get. Let's say I'm baking bread and I put down that I need flour. However, I forgot that used up my yeast when I last baked two weeks ago and I forgot to put that down on my list. The "you forgot to get" feature would look at my past purchasing history and tell me, hey you might want to check if you have enough yeast since you last purchased yeast 6 months ago. Maybe even it could see if a phone is currently located in the house where you live, is one of your families phones and send a text message asking them to check and see if there is any yeast in the cupboard.
With regard to your use case, if you used a recipe and it was in an application on your device, you could track the usage and know exactly how much you had left. Exapanding that a bit, use the bar code, scanned by the camera on the device, to record which brand you use. Cross reference that with a coupon management application to determine who has the best price today and add it to a shopping list, tagged with the geolocation of the store. The coupons are scanned and tagged to determine if they are store specific with current coupon doubling/upgrading policies taken into account when figuring the value.
In a broader use case, if the register could use near field to communicate ( or email to start) your receipt to you. You could then update an aggregate database in the cloud for other users with up to the minute pricing similar to gas buddy types of applications. The application could then tag all of the prices with geolocation data to determine the store, region and chain involved. Shopping applications could then use that data for the most accurate savings.
On an even larger scale, someone could then data mine that information to determine retailer's pricing trends and spot inconsistencies based on geographic location or other geographic related data such as median income, census data etc. I think it would be very revealing, which means the retailers will fight it tooth and nail.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Ah, you mean like Germany where the Samsung Tab got banned because it was a rectangle? I know people love saying "well, that's just them", but the reality is everyone is being affected by stupid laws like this. ACTA, anyone?
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Um, I think Roast Beef and Ray Smuckles have prior art on this.
http://achewood.com/index.php?date=05082002
http://achewood.com/eggsmilk.php
If the nation's first patent officer, Thomas Jefferson, knew what his beloved system has been turned into, he'd have abandoned the idea entirely, I believe.
He even turned himself down for patents and he was the guy who approved patents!
He also believed that the more important any technical or scientific advance was for society, the shorter the patent should last. If we had followed his original intent, everything in the iPhone would already be public domain.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I take BART into work and sometimes got a ride home, and sometimes I'd forget to pick up my car. So , I realised that location based alarms were a technically feasable feature using GPS units or the newer cellphones that were location aware - so you'd be able to setup reminders to pick up your car when the bay bridge was crossed, or pick up milk when you entered a supermarket.
Back then there was no iPhone and getting the location info on most phones was just too much trouble so I abandoned the idea after a couple of weeks poking around.
I have a patent on patenting obvious, trivial ideas. You'll be hearing from my lawyers...
Sig expected Real Soon Now.
I just have enough with this shit. They are not innovating or creating anything. They are just adding a parameter to a reminder. So let's file patents for other possible reminder parameters: Temperature: "reminder: buy scarf, it's fucking cold!" altitude: "reminder: dude, take a picture of the nice view" timezone change: "reminder: it's gonna be rough tomorrow" lighting: "reminder: open car lights" humidity: "reminder: bring umbrella" wumpus proximity: "reminder: kill wumpus" enough with this shit
Has it occurred to anyone that not making yourself have the mental discipline to remember what errands you have to do on a given day might just be eroding our mental faculties much sooner than otherwise? Seriously: The human brain is like any other part of your body, and even more so in some ways: If you never have to think for yourself, your ability to do so diminishes. If you've got an "app" for everything on your phone, what are you going to do when you don't happen to have your phone with you, or it's not working (battery dead, no connectivity, etc)? Don't sit there and tell me "That'll never happen" because IT WILL, and it's happening to us right now: Can you dial all your freinds' phone numbers from memory? YOUR memory, NOT the phone's?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
It's understandable that all those product-designer types also want to have some kind of IP protection, but can't they just go and play in some different playground?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Honestly, this shit is ruining the industry
Inventions are the result of needs. Needs are the result of the current economic and technological landscape.
So, at any given moment, most of the world's inventors are experiencing the same set of needs at the same time, and hence tend to produce the same inventions at the same time.
The race to the patent office is common, with people winning by sometimes very narrow margins.
But there are also OTHER legal requirements beyond just being first, not the least of which is non-obviousness. See also KSR vs TeleFlex.
The mere fact that there are multiple solutions appearing nearly simultaneously suggests that the application is OBVIOUS, just as using bricks to build an outhouse.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Maybe it's different for you guys, but generally we know when we need to go to the grocery store. We use this innovative tool - we like to call it a "grocery list" - to which we add an item when we run out of it. Then, when we go to the grocery store, we take said "grocery list" with us and purchase the items contained therein. Note that we expressly do not limit ourselves to purchasing only the items on the list.
If we haven't gone to the grocery store recently, it's almost certainly due to our schedules rather than an inability to remember that we need to go.
BTW while I did come up with this great idea, let this post serve as official notice that I hereby release this concept under a Creative Commons Attribution 3 Unported license, with the following modification: I hereby waive the attribution clause for any and all users.
#DeleteChrome
The denial I read said "Visa does not track marital status" blah blah blah, o.k. Visa may not, but the credit reporting bureaus used by the banks which issue Visa cards sure as hell do. And, I get a statement at the end of the year that breaks down my purchases into food, fuel, entertainment, etc. I find it hard to believe that nobody is tracking any of that data at a higher level of granularity than they are reporting it back to me... maybe not, maybe I'm just paranoid, but I know that 25 years ago, managers at grocery stores had real-time sales figures, down to the individual UPC codes and aggregated in a dozen different ways, I'm sure it wasn't long before that data made its way back to chain headquarters in real-time. And, yes, loyalty cards make it easier for the stores to track your patterns, but I use my cash-back credit card to buy groceries, they certainly could track me by that if they wanted to.
.. they are called mothers, wives, and girlfriends...
"Got milk" is just shortened from "Honey, did you remember to pick up some milk"...
The "game" is defined under terms that are illogical, we should not expect logical behavior. They aim to patent as broadly as possible push the boundaries, shift regulations in their favor. An ecosystem supportive for rapid distributions of disruptive technology may be lost... and society has to spend massive amounts of resources on patent absurdities, but we are living in times of absurd levels of innovation.
... i.e more lawyers.
In other words If you have to find something positive of this whole mess, it does put a bit of a damper on our march towards singularity.
It remains unclear if the global economies can be aligned to play by these rules for slowing down technological progress, in which case we could see rise of more R&D centers in nation with more favorable systems for intellectual property management. Right now the investment trade offs have not been crossed. But at some point global innovation may transition to lots of smaller non-aligned free platforms of innovation. We can see this in non-aligned open source projects that are not subject to the more absurd patent games since they are not centers of economic power. We can see traditional of highly isolated vertically R&D centers having to reinvent the wheel on many layers of their infrastructure, or work around broad patents. This all helps slow down innovation.
Corporations will transition into organizations consisting almost entirely of lawyers that negotiate the legal implications of distributing something that is a commodity or otherwise freely available. We can see this as an extreme version of what Google is doing with android or what pharmaceutical and gene therapy research centers have become and where they are going
Its not a positive trend for innovation..But does damper relative investment into massive R&D projects with shared infrastructure and multiple layers of shared global IP, that is the basis of hyper innovation.
All this "unhealthy activity" may not be that "unhealthy" as it could help push singularity back a few years. Maybe even enable some legal and cultural framework for a structured roll out of the total transformation of everything that singularity will entail. Unnaturally stretching singularity out over the course of a few years instead of ripping apart global economies all at once. This may help avoid some serious problems, like total economic collapse in the "free" automation of "everything", that could leave billions of people without way to sustain their existence.
Lets set up a community of people who seek out info on new patent applications then go and search for prior art and then start submitting that into the toe patent office against new patent applications.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I see no problem with three companies having patents for location aware reminders, remember patents are supposed to protect an implementation. To use a car analogy, how many patents are their for carburetors.
The problem stems from overly broad patents. It breaks down to "I have a patent for location aware reminders now no one else can do it." is bad, while "I have a patent for doing location aware reminders in this way." is good;.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Considering the human brain can remind us to "get milk" when we get to a specific location (like a shopping centre) I think this patent should extend to human thought too. This would mean that if I remember to buy milk while im at the shops, I will need to pay a royalty to the patent holder. Of course, policing this could be done in the same way as the music industry works. Where If I remember to buy milk at the shops and dont pay the royalty the company holding the patent can send out blanket legal threats to everyone in the shop at the time. It will then be up to the courts to decide if I actually remembered to buy milk prior to going to the shops. Obviously I will be considered guilty and will need to prove my innocence costing me thousands of dollars in lawyers fees.
Those patents sound awfully similar to me. What happens in a case where the Patent Office grants two (or more than two) patents that cover the same "innovation"?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Or TPPA. ACTA is nothing compared to that. TPPA even allows the pharma industry to screw the US government! Equal opportunity screwing!
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Confidant. Not bloody cosmonaut.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
They use the merchant code - they still don't know what you bought, only what the merchant says they primarily sell. Note that your pr0n is also categorised, whether it says so on your bill or not (the exception if they go via CCbill or similar, who because they don't sell the content can rightly claim that they are merely a "payment service provider" or something).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
This is where out US patent group, judicial branch, executive branch, I don't know who exactly, needs to step in and say "YOU DID NOT INVENT REMINDING PEOPLE TO DO STUFF!"
It's not gonna happen until we clean out Congress. Our representatives are not representing us.
We need something like term limits for Congress to keep any ONE member from becoming too powerful.
Seriously. We should just burn the patent office down.
Location reminders. Ident that suggestion to Apple 3 years ago. It was a no brainier and should have been included in the first GPs enabled iPhone. Google Circles, had that idea for 5 years.
Have many more. But at several thousand dollars a patent, it's pretty much relegated to the wealthy. It's why I have no respect for IP anymore. The entire IP system in its present form should be abolished as in violation of the Constitution. The patent office should be required to accept free submissions into public domain. Then if any patent is found to have had a similar entry submitted prior it's voided.
There are better ways to accomplish the goals of patents. Ways that are far more accessible, encourage innovation and benefit the inventors. Three thing out present system obstructs.
The mobile social network Loopt or its competitors could conceivably predict with 90 percent accuracy where an individual will be tomorrow.
They invented that 90% number out of the blue skies, and then you make it 99%. You forgot to go through the 95% phase :)
Yet they cant predict that I'm abroad even when a Visa credit card does not need notification and is used, but a Visa debit card in the same name and the same bank is blocked for trying to take money out of an ATM.
Visa is collecting data on your purchases, thats your statements, but they dont have anyone to make it into information with any degree of accuracy.
By the way, in the article is 90%...
Remember the milk has been doing this for a while:
http://blog.rememberthemilk.com/2009/09/new-for-pro-remember-the-milk-for-android/
I'm pretty sure that a message like "Get milk" would be blocked in Pakistan anyway.
No left turn unstoned.
Has had this feature since the first iPhone had a GPS chip. It wasn't flexible enough to remind you when you passed *any* milk store, but tasks could be assigned a location, and you could set a radius for notification.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
I think it is more the member banks who issue the cards rather than "Visa" or "MasterCard" themselves... I have had a Visa card from a small credit union, and it has never gone on "fraud alert" for any reason. I have also had a Visa card from a couple of large commercial banks, and they are pretty quick to notice when I'm in a strange town, or even buying things in my own town but out of my normal pattern.
I went on a "wardrobe replacement" shopping trip to the local mall, bought maybe $1000 worth of clothes - more than 10x what I had spent in that mall in the previous 5 years... next day I'm trying to buy some gas and the card isn't working. Most times the bank will reinstate the card immediately upon a phone call.
If so many people have the same idea, it shows the idea is obvious and a patent should not be granted to ANY of them.
How about this: "Humans are capable of location-based reminders (some of us, anyway) so would that constitute prior art?" And why wouldn't this also be considered "obvious" and not "novel"?
Most lay-people don't understand that the requirements for new patents have changed. It used to be that patents had to be innovative. Not so, any longer. They now need to abuse the patent system in innovative ways. Also, you are required to cite prior art in the form of a haiku, making citing specific patent numbers quite difficult.
Who will make a phone for the lactose intolerant?
"recalculating turn right....."
A location based service for sure.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
No damnit, round corners are NOT obvious! If it wasn't for Apples ingenuity we'd still be running around with sharp pokey things in our pockets. Genius I tell you, genius.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Does your log cabin consist of round logs? If yes, then surely you must realize it is in violation of several patents.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once