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Ban on Certain Samsung Products Appears Likely ITC Ruling
Ars Technica reports that
"On Friday the ITC filed a redacted version of a remedy suggested by ITC Administrative Law Judge Thomas Pender, in which he recommended a ban be enforced against Samsung products that were found to infringe upon four Apple patents. The judge also recommended that Samsung post a bond for 88 percent of the value of its infringing mobile phones, as well as 32.5 percent of the value of infringing media players, and 37.6 percent of the value of infringing tablets." That sounds like a clear loss for Samsung, but the judge "also approved several workarounds suggested by Samsung that might permit the company to continue selling the implicated products (which include the Transform, Acclaim, Indulge and Intercept smartphones, according to Computerworld). These workarounds would sidestep infringing on Apple's four patents—which include one design patent and three technology patents." Ruling and remedy have yet to be approved by the panel whose word would make them final.
Now if we can ban all other products that infringe on all other patents, our transformation can be complete and we can finally move back into caves!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Maybe your R&D department can cook up some great new products. But if there is even the slightest crack anywhere in them, where a patent lawyer can jam a crowbar into . . . you might as well forget it. Your legal costs would be more than the entire R&D cost of the project.
So I wonder now how companies plan development projects these days?
Executive: "What will you need to develop this new product?"
Manager: "80 programmers, 20 management & support, . . . and . . . 1000 lawyers.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
You mean:
* Patent office merely registers useless patents
* Actual patent suit gets competition locked in courts while patent is carefully examined
(In other words, almost like now)
Supreme court ruled that to be non-obvious and invention had to be more than the sum of its parts. So pinch zoom on a handset isn't new just because its on a handset. It existed before on a computer and a handset is just a computer, so what's the invention? Calling it a handset instead of a computer???
IMHO the Obviousness test used today is also to blame.
Apple should not have been granted those patents on other people inventions. They did not make the first rounded rectangle touch computer, they did not invent the camera icon to represent a camera. The assembly of those two items does not a new invention make.
Patent should be declined by default, but also the 'more than the sum of the parts' test was sound thinking too.
No.
In the (exceptionally rare) case where a patent is genuinely a good and valid one, the owner can get to prove it is valid when he goes to court.
In the common case (trivial and bogus patents), the failure of the patent-office to deny them would not hurt the defendant.
In general, however, I think that the entire patent system is worse than useless, and we should simply abolish "intellectual monopolies".
To address your point, many people have the mis-perception that patents help small inventors. This isn't true. Small inventors are far likely to be harmed by the predatory actions of a large company (which uses its own patents to crush the small guy) than they are likely to be protected. To put it another way, If I have an idea, I want the right to use it. Patents give me the right (which I don't want) to destroy your business; they also cause me the risk (which I greatly fear) that someone else wilI come along and destroy mine.
The judge also recommended that Samsung post a bond for 88 percent of the value of its infringing mobile phones, as well as 32.5 percent of the value of infringing media players, and 37.6 percent of the value of infringing tablets.
Software patents are completely out hand. This is not what the patent system was intended to do, this is madness.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
You completely invalidate any point you might have when you use retarded phrases like "samscum."
Truly, it makes you look like an idiot.
The US is just terrified by the Far East economic boom.
It will continue, it is reactionary, and it's also a losing strategy.
US, cuddle your Apple baby and cry.
That would work if justice wasn't so damn ridiculously expensive. As it is nobody who is not a big corporation can afford the legal costs. Being right makes no difference.
Look like they have succesfully bribed ITC to block devices competing with them and drop cases against them (eg. Motorola case). And I suspect that whole Wall-Street estabulshitment is backing them - money junkies and banksters are too much invested in Apple to let any competition threaten Apple's obscenic margins. This is scenario I'm worried about for some time: monopolistic cash cow artificially created by Wall Street crooks. Openness coming with Android is what they're fighting against, not Samsung. Add it to long list of Wall Street crimes they've done over all those years: internet bubble, housing bubble, derivatives, bailouts, market rigging (see LIBOR scandal), drug money laundering (see HSBC or Wachovia, now Citi). It's the whole system stacked against 'we, the people'. If you're uncomfortable enough to not feed Apple with your money, you should also consider NOT feeding other Wall Street firms whenever possible. Along with Apple, Microsoft, Coca Cola, Monsanto, Wallmart or Goldman Sachs they're all parts of one big criminal cartel 'we the people' should fight off so that in coming years you can tell your children that at least you've tried...
I'm glad the patent wars are being fought out in the telecom industry, instead say the computer hardware or software industry, in hopes that people will see the folly of this idiotic and in the end destructive set of laws concerning patents.
But I have no illusion that if this is not stopped, it will spill over into every other aspect of our lives, from patents in software (which is already ramping up) to foods, cars, books and more. The damage will be impressive.
Apart from the problems with the patent system, the ITC is out of control. The ITC is part of the executive branch and has no business adjudicating the validity of patents. There needs to be a serious house cleaning at the federal level; unfortunately, the guy to do it didn't even get invited to the debates.
No, this smacks of protectionism, something both conservatives and liberals are fond of; remember, this ruling comes from the ITC.
I'm suggesting that 90% of the ones that are currently granted should be rejected.
The Australian system is actually a good idea - it means that inventors can have their rubber stamp cheaply, and that it doesn't arm the patent trolls.
But seriously, when more than half the patent suits are brought by non-practising entities (the balance tipped last year), and when patent thickets are so severe that innovators have to just ignore the patents and hope not to be sued... the system is broken.
We should just scrap the whole thing. Patents help lawyers, and sometimes as a paper-trail for VC-funding. But in reaility, the whole patent system is now parasitic upon inventors and manufacturers.
That's right righteous Apple soldiers!
Mod down the unbelievers!
The Australian system is actually a good idea - it means that inventors can have their rubber stamp cheaply, and that it doesn't arm the patent trolls.
It's a great idea, if you don't want to actually help inventors, but just want to take money from them. Frankly, I'd rather see inventors encouraged to innovate, rather than just hitting them with fees and giving them a useless piece of paper.
But seriously, when more than half the patent suits are brought by non-practising entities (the balance tipped last year), and when patent thickets are so severe that innovators have to just ignore the patents and hope not to be sued... the system is broken.
In what way is that broken? I understand that you hate trolls, but to imply that it's their non-practicing status that's the bad part, rather than their extortionate methods, or forum shopping, or the like, is just insane. Plus, what about other non-practicing entities, like Cornell, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Cal Tech, etc.? Let's focus on the real problems like I noted rather than latching on to some irrelevant characteristic that doesn't actually affect the legitimacy of their suits.
We should just scrap the whole thing. Patents help lawyers, and sometimes as a paper-trail for VC-funding. But in reaility, the whole patent system is now parasitic upon inventors and manufacturers.
All litigation helps lawyers... why aren't you calling for contract law, tort law, bankruptcy law, etc. to be scrapped too? Again, it seems like you're ignoring legitimate problems with the system and instead latching on to irrelevancies - a subset of NPEs are patent trolls, so all NPEs are bad and the system should be scrapped; lawyers make money, so therefore the system is bad and should be scrapped. Without (i) a clear understanding of what the problems are, and (ii) a suggestion for how to solve them, your cries of "let's abolish all legal systems" is going to fall on deaf ears.
Patents are bad in practice, but they are wrong in theory too. The philosohpical problems are: independent invention, and the shoulders of giants.
* If you and I independently solve the same problem and create a product, then we should both have the right to make our businesses from it. Just because I filed first doesn't mean that you stole my idea, nor should it give me the right to crush your business.
* If I invent something, I maybe did 0.001% of the work. Everything else was drawn from the public domain, my education, and from the scientific community. That invention isn't truly "mine", and it's certainly not "mine and mine alone".
Thomas Jefferson was right when he said:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. "
Aside: my point about lawyers here was that patents help *only* lawyers. In contract law, the lawyers help ordinary people to do what they want. Patent lawyers are the only people who benefit from, promote, and strengthen the patent system - practically every engineer wishes the system would just go away.