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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.
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?
No, if you are too unspecific you will fall to prior art. If you are too specific they will just avoid the patent by changing a mentioned detail.
Your shyster files a bunch of patents with various degrees of specificity.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
> ... as unspecific as you can, then you will always win?
PATENT == CLEAR, EVIDENT, OPEN TO VIEW
Hence, there cannot be anything vague or the patent is not, erm, patent.
The original French term is "patent letter", a document which is open for anyone to read. That is the trade-off one does to get an authorization for exclusive exploitation of an invention or product.
Of course, "modern" patents have been distorted to become a way to hide technology and effectively hamper progress.
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.
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.
Wouldn't it kind of defeat the purpose of patenting the idea if the only company that would have the need to use the patented invention was given permission to use it for free? Granted, the patent still has 15 years to go before it runs out, but SpaceX is likely to be the only company using the technology in the near future.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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".
Those who support the patent system claim that their purpose is to disclose all of the information that somebody "skilled in the art" (aka somebody trained in that specific engineering field with credentials, degrees, or some other recognition of competence) can take the information disclosed in the patent and be able to duplicate the invention.
In former times, the USPTO actually required either a copy of the invention or a working model to demonstrate the concept. Thousands of these models can still be found floating around the USPTO building, including some funny perpetual motion machines that have been tried before. The working models at least forced the patent developer to show that the idea was physically possible.
I might even buy this argument, assuming that it was possible with the patent application and supporting documents to be able to treat the USPTO as a sort of archive of technological knowledge. Unfortunately, as you sort of point out, it doesn't do any of that, nor is there any way for an engineer to be able to dig through the stacks of patent applications of years past to try and come up with some interesting ideas for future products or even simply to figure out how something worked, like the Saturn F1 engine (or something comparable from 50+ years ago).
The current patent database is a waste of paper, time, and effort beyond a way for large companies to grind into the dust any small company that can't afford the patenting process. It is IMHO the single best thing to shut down small business development and kill job creation in general. I have to presume those are goals for politicians who support the patent process?
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.
"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.
It could be treated as a defensive patent. Basically saying that the whole concept of patents stink, but as a necessary evil since they do exist we should try to get a bunch of patents anyway to make sure our competitors don't sue us into the ground with patent lawsuits of their own. It becomes a massive patent war where you can charge back with your own patents, or go after trolls because you not only have prior art but have prior patents that should have been cited by any subsequent patent claims.
Prior art is one thing, but a prior patent takes precedence like none other in federal court. For that matter, a prior patent is useful even if it has expired.
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.
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