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SpaceX's Challenge Against Blue Origins' Patent Fails To Take Off
speedplane writes As was previously discussed on Slashdot, back in September SpaceX challenged a patent owned by Blue Origin. The technology concerned landing rockets at sea. Yesterday, the judges in the case issued their opinion stating that they are unable to initiate review of the patent on the grounds brought by SpaceX. Although at first glance this would appear to be a Blue Origin win, looking closer, the judges explained that Blue Origin's patent lacks sufficient disclosure, effectively stating that the patent is invalid, but not on the specific grounds brought by SpaceX: "Because claim 14 lacks adequate structural support for some of the means-plus-function limitations, it is not amenable to construction. And without ascertaining the breadth of claim 14, we cannot undertake the necessary factual inquiry for evaluating obviousness with respect to differences between the claimed subject matter and the prior art." If SpaceX wants to move forward against Blue Origin, this opinion bodes well for them, but they will need to take their case in front of a different court.
If you patent something, make sure to be as unspecific as you can, then you will always win?
How is the patent enforceable in international waters? Federal courts have ruled they aren't in other lawsuits.
http://www.lexology.com/librar...
I'm genuinely curious.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Wernher von Braun
You are funny. I believe it is Space X that poured money into actually doing it and Blue Origin just spent money filing a patent.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
that the patent mentions landing the opposite way from the way that spaceX lands?
Meaning the rocket has another engine pointed the other way at the other end of the first stage.
Sounds a lot like the all-American inventor hero Edison.
One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
There was a period in the early 00's when one of the my company's manager would periodically walk through my office door and the first words out of his mouth was "I just read about this patent..." and I'd stop him right there.
"This is going to be one of those things where the extent of the filer's 'invention' was to take something people were doing with LORAN fifty years ago, cross out 'LORAN' and write in 'GPS', isn't it?"
"Well," he'd begin.
"I don't want to hear about it. It's guaranteed to be invalid on the basis of obviousness, but if they get lucky in court and I've actually read or even heard about that specific patent they'll be able to take us to the cleaners."
You'd be amazed at some of the technology patents the patent office grants. Stuff anyone who'd been a practicing engineer for more than a few months would laugh his ass off at if he were patent examiner.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
How can a dodgy subordinate claim invalidate the rest of the patent? If it was that easy there'd be a ton of software patents that could be tossed out en masse.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I can't tell if you're serious.
The idea of landing a stage on rocket power for reuse has been around for decades (DC-X comes to mind, there may be earlier examples.) As rockets generally launch seaward for safety reasons, that you might want to land one at sea is obvious. The idea of using a ship as a landing platform has also been around for decades. There is nothing that should be patentable in the big idea "landing a rocket on a ship".
Within this general idea, there are bound to be many smaller patentable ideas: e.g. method for automatically securing a rocket to a deck when it could be up to 15m away from the target landing point.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Because BO developed NOTHING OF THE SORT. Its a blatant copy of someone elses work.
When in the USA a patent court said that you invention is unpatentable, Its have to be pretty obvius, Because in the USA even water is patentable.
It seems the court said that they can't determine if the patent is obvious because it is vague.
As for obvious, it would seem that Mr. Buck Rodgers Plus the flyout tragectory would point one to land tail first a sea.
Sounds a bit like a game of clue?
The general plan is obvious, the details to make is actually work are not.
It would seem that Blue patented the easy general plan, but X is doing the hard work to make it actually work.
One might ask if Blue patented something when they did not know how actually to make it work.
Aside from a bad patent, that would seem like fraud to me.
Perhaps if Blue is smart, they will offer X a free license to use their 'technology' in exchange for dropping any attempt to squash the patent.
That would be win/win for Blue and X.
Alternatively, Blue likely looses their patent and X has to expend useless effort to right a patent wrong.
And as usual, lawyers win no matter what happens.
Blue Origin was founded two years before SpaceX, and they've spent a considerable amount of money on making things. They just don't have the incredible PR and Bond-villain CEO that SpaceX has.
Or Westinghouse or any of the major other industrial era inventors. In fact the more things change the more they stay the same.
Could you name a single person that developed something, patented and built a business on it? People like Edison that manage the development or purchase/steal the idea are the norm, not the solitary inventor who becomes a millionaire.
I knew the patent system was horribly broken but this is obscene. Perhaps I'll patent "Utilizing a multi-wheeled conveyance to traverse a network of engineered level surfaces to traverse from an origination point to a destination point". This patent doesn't seem to cover any real technology but the general idea of "launching from a land site and landing on an ocean platform".
> Blue Origin legitimately spent massive resources developing this method and deserve compensation if SpaceX wants to use it.
Another poster says it was the other way around (Blue Origin would be a patent troll, thus).
But even if it spent "massive resources", what does it have to do with anything?
LOL, you spent 50 million bucks to devise tele-transport and the Joneses' 14-year old built an equivalent thing to avoid being late to school. You know what? Fsck you!
This is called being an entrepreneur. You put money expecting a ROI; sometimes, sh*t happens and you have to assume the risks of failure. Don't want risks? Open a bank, it's way less risky (unless you are stupidly dumb, like we've seen recently).
I find simply incredible how anyone with enough money can lobby for laws to protect his/her company from capitalism. How is this acceptable in a Western economy? This is exactly what would happen in a banana republic!
Why should they get a monopoly on doing something just because they spent money trying to do it? Should nobody but SpaceX be allowed to send recoverable spacecraft into orbit, just because they spent a bunch of money doing it and were the first private entity to do so?
Come on now, give the guy some credit. Edison Carter got his hands dirty all the time.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Could you name a single person that developed something, patented and built a business on it?
Larry Page?
> Could you name a single person that developed something,
> patented and built a business on it? People like Edison that
> manage the development or purchase/steal the idea are the
> norm, not the solitary inventor who becomes a millionaire.
Do we get bonus points if TFA is about their company?
Karon Moses Lake, Von Horn W. Texas, PM1... Blue Origin did build stuff.
"I don't want to hear about it. It's guaranteed to be invalid on the basis of obviousness, but if they get lucky in court and I've actually read or even heard about that specific patent they'll be able to take us to the cleaners."
This is one of the aspects of the whole concept of a patent that to me invalidates why patents even have a right to exist. The purpose of a patent, according to the U.S. Constitution, is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Art". I fail to see how the current system even attempts to secure that goal if engineers are basically prohibited from even hearing and talking about various patents.
Or an actual launch vehicle.
How about Elon Musk himself? He doesn't seem to be a patent shrill (he makes things, faster than we expect in most cases). He didn't create all of the patents he controls, but those working for him did (assumption, he may have bought some patents, bet he's using them). He's into solar, space, electric cars (all thanks Dr. Seuss, "and Mars").
He's pretty incredible actually. And he's more than a millionaire.
BlameBillCosby.com
So, Blue Origin just decided one day; "Hey wouldn't it be cool if we could land space ships at sea?" and went ahead and patented the idea without the foggiest notion of how this might realistically be accomplished?
And now there's a patent that provides the "what" but absolutely no detail about the "how" one might go about doing this?
I think we need to take a lesson from the past: bring back the law where before a patent may be filed it must first be backed by a valid working prototype. That should fix all those millions of spurious software patents filed each year too.
The current patent system constricts technology rather than acting as the enabler patents are supposed to be.
They aren't trying to get a monopoly. They're trying to get a theoretical monopoly by someone who just thought of it and never proved it in practice /dismissed/ so they aren't barred from operating (or in general, so they aren't harassed for it)
Narrator: I just need to know if you've seen Tyler.
Proprietor of Dry Cleaners: I'm not disclosed to bespeak any such information to you, nor would I, even if I had said information you want, at this juncture be able
Narrator: [Resigned] You're a moron.
Proprietor of Dry Cleaners: [as Narrator is leaving] I'm afraid I'm gonna have to ask you to leave.
Didn't their stupid one click patent fall apart, mostly, for being unspecific?
I still won't buy anything from Jeff Bezos on purpose.
They haven't flown anything in 3 years (and that was a capsule abort test). The sub-orbital vehicle "New Shepard" hasn't flown since 2011. Even Virgin Galactic flies more often than BO. SpaceX has flown more operational flights in the past 6 months than BO has had test launches since the company was founded. SpaceX may have better PR, but then again they are actually doing stuff beyond publishing the odd PowerPoint every few years