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Judge Invalidates 13 Motorola Patent Claims Against Microsoft
walterbyrd writes "Microsoft scored a victory against Google-owned Motorola Mobility this week after a judge scrapped 13 of the latter party's patent claims in a years-long dispute over H.264-related royalties. Waged in U.S. and German courts, the battle involves three patents (7,310,374, 7,310,375, and 7,310,376) that Motorola licenses to Microsoft for several products, including the Xbox 360, Windows and Windows Phone. PJ is commenting on the case over at Groklaw.net."
Just a simple plan to help you survive these times of financial strife.
1. Stop wasting money on lawyers.
2. Start making quality products.
3. ??? (actually you can skip this step)
4. profit.
If a Judge (not a Jury) can invalidate Patent claims (are they THAT skilled in the science of these things?) then what the heck's the Patent Office for?
Is there any point in lodging a complaint to the Patent Office, when a Judge appears to be able to do it quicker, and knows the parties involved?
So in future, don't waste time with going the usual route, just get a Judge to decide on complex matters, and then the Patent Office, now with more time on it's hands, can start ruling in criminal trials.
What a mess.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Software patents are so problematic because if you expose your essential algorithm which uses code blocks then all someone has to do is code to it with different variable names.
It is the same problem as why technology stagnated during the times before the renaissance and then industrial revolution, methods were kept secret by guilds.
We are placing far too much monetary value upon "the intellectual property of software" and if too much software is granted "a Royal Monopoly" like status. Because that status can then be horded we are headed for a technological dark age.
Who can blame the Chinese for employing industrial espionage when much of the technology they seek to achieve is being bartered by those who would squirrel it away in medieval style corporate guilds.
Queen Elizabeth the First at the end of her reign had the foresight to abolish the monopolies, we are reversing the trend and it will eventually cause stagnation and strife in the advancement of technology if left unchecked to run amok. The same as the imaginary mortgage security products market did to us all.
We either open up the patent system and let the best engineers and manufactures win or have a bunch of coders at desks trading ideas for imaginary devices in a ponzi scheme of so called intellectual property rights for products and services.
The headline clearly states "invalidates patent claims", so how come the headline is bullshit?
Go RTFH(eadline).
Microsoft is arguing that as a 'means plus function' patent, it isn't specific enough because it doesn't specifically give an algorithm. Surely if this goes through it will invalidate the vast majority of software patents?
It's not really about an algorithm per se. It's about specifying precisely what the algorithm is going to achieve. "Pick some block using some algorithm" isn't specific enough. "Pick some block using the following algorith: blablabla" is. "Pick some block by choosing among all blocks with distance less than 5 units the one that minimises the prediction error defined by the formula xxx" is specific enough, even if the implementor has to find their own algorithm.