There are a lot of implications of this viewpoint, and if everyone (especially Congress) could keep it straight, our IP laws would be a lot more sane -- and would tend to achieve rather than undermine the underlying goal. In the case of patent law, one implication of the real goal is that we can measure the effectiveness of the system by how often inventors search the patent database looking for solutions to problems, or for ideas to spark new inventions.
Though I agree with the rest of your post, I think your suggested test is too narrow - patents also allow inventors to publish white papers, theses, functional specifications, flow charts, etc. without destroying their IP protection, unlike trade secrets. Accordingly, we should also measure the effectiveness of the system by how often inventors search those for ideas.
1. This was something I meant to ask in a previous informative/. encounter with you: is that damages limit per patent, per holder of a set of patents, or for all patents infringed? It's one thing if you're violating only a few patents, but the article makes the claim that a smartphone is covered by a quarter-million of them. If I get sued by a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand different patent holders....
Per device type... Since patent damges are limited to a reasonable royalty, you can't very well pay 10% royalties to one hundred people. So, when the 10th patent owner comes around, you say "I'm already paying x% to these 9 guys... all that's left for you is y%." Yes, this means that the first patent owner who sues you will get the biggest bite of the pot, but that encourages speedy resolution of suits. Additionally, you can return to court to rejudge damages and get your royalty payments reduced if it turns out that 10% to the first guy wasn't reasonable, in light of the other royalty payments.
The important thing to remember is that patent damages are compensatory in nature, not punitive. No one wins if you get pushed into bankruptcy, because you go out of business and aren't paying royalties. It's better for everyone involved that you make at least a tiny bit of profit and keep paying license fees, and so courts and patent owners will work to revise royalty payment percentages as necessary.
2. Another thing I've noticed is slashdot posters who are claiming they are specifically being told by their legal departments that they should NOT look at existing patents (and this is not something new). If this is endemic, what does it mean for the part of the purpose of the patent system whereby future inventors are supposed to build upon the work of previous inventors rather than waste resources reinventing the wheel? Does it need fixing and how could it be fixed?
The justification behind it is that it's impossible to prove that you willfully infringed a patent if you had no knowledge of it, and damages don't start until you're aware. So, for example, if Company A has patent A, issued in 2000, and you read it in 2001, you could be liable for damages all the way back to 2001, even though they sue you today. Otherwise, Company A can only get damages starting today onwards... and if you're quick and push out a software patch (for example) disabling that functionality, their damages could literally be for a few days of use.
The primary counterargument is that patents are a pretty poor place to learn about the technology of others... Rather, you learn about that technology by reading white papers, reading theses, reading functional specifications, and taking apart the technology to see how it works. And, without the protection of patents, companies would want to surpress all of that and keep them trade secrets, with heavy NDA licenses just to use the tech.
That said, yes, it sucks. The reform needed isn't on the patent-gettin' side, but on the patent-suin' side (which could also use some damage reforms that would surpress patent trolling). For example, if Company A knew about you in 2001 and sat on their hands letting the damages clock tick up for years, then maybe they should be estopped from claiming damages for that period. Alternately, if Company A didn't know about you in 2001 (but you knew about their patent) and didn't find out about you until 2011, then maybe you were so tiny for those 10 years that they weren't really damaged much, and their royalties should be a few thousandths of a percent for that period... or less.
No, I had no office objections ever filed. Probably because I make absolutely unique things.
But it was as simple as filing my patent, paying the application fee, and waiting. Issued patents. No challenges, no questions, NOT ONE THING.
Couple years later, patent acceptance in the mail.
"If so, I'm calling you a liar. An easily provable one too: identify one or more of your patents."
My NDA from the Department of Agriculture forbids that, unless you carry DoD clearance issued via investigation higher than ANACI.
Give me that and we'll talk.
Bullshiat.
First, all issued patents are public documents, published under 37 CFR 1.11. They are open to the public for inspection, and cannot be under any non-disclosure agreements or secrecy orders, by definition. If your so-called "issued patent" was under a secrecy order under 37 CFR 5.2, it would be just an application, not issued by definition, and it would not have ever been examined. Got it? There are no such things as secret patents - there are applications that the military stamps "secret" on, that go into a locked file cabinet and never, ever get inspected. They aren't issued - they're withheld from being issued. If that's what you're claiming to have, then it is not and never was a patent.
Second, why would the DoA even care about a DoD clearance? Somehow, I doubt your "method for fingering a pig" really is crucial to national secrecy.
Nonsense. Patents apply to everybody. There's no exception for people who "only" make 1-10 units. Patents literally forbid you to tinker in your own home and then sell the item you just invented, if someone paid a fee and lodged a vague sounding description about something roughly similar already.
Except that patent infringement damages are going to be limited, by definition, to 100% of your revenue at most, and will be more likely around 5-20%. And so, since it will cost a company around $150,000-250,000 to file and win that patent suit, and their potential damages if they win are around $20-30, with a maximum in the hundreds, no one is going to enforce a patent over that many units.
I think the point is that Seagate is a subsidiary of Samsung, and the "ah-ha moment" he talks about in that post trial interview where after he takes the role of making the case for Apple, may have been more like "ah-ha, I can get some revenge."
Understood - I was simply correcting GP poster who believed since it was a patent case, you could presume bias in any other patent case. His premise was false, so his conclusion was invalid. It could still be true for other reasons, but not for that one.
The latter - the PTO has to prove you wrong, and if they can't, they have to issue the patent.
I've just invented a knerbweg for throoling a morginated comdowuler via a plirkitwang.
Can you disprove that?
Sure... It's unpatentable under 35 USC 112 because your terms are undefined, and you'd receive a rejection on those grounds. You can rebut it by providing explicit definitions.
I mean, really... You think the USPTO never thought of that?
Since the cases he never fully disclosed involved patents, you can pretty much assume bias in a patent case and rescind the verdict, for reasons of tainted jury.
According to Hogan, when Seagate hired him in the 1980s and he moved from Colorado to California, his new employer agreed to split the cost of paying off the mortgage on his Colorado home. But after Hogan was laid off in the early 1990s, he told us, Seagate claimed he owed the company that money. Hogan said he sued Seagate for fraud, Seagate countersued, and he ultimately declared personal bankruptcy to protect his house."
That suit against Seagate was over breach of contract and fraud, not patents.
In that case I still keep my "Nuts!" comment, but no longer point it at your comment, but at the patent law. And you have my sympathies - I think I like MY job even more now...
I don't believe in that patent stuff at all anyway - I'm German, after all, and the way we got to where we are was through COPYING (British machines). I would be a hypocrite to defend patents now, just because now WE have the machines and somebody else copies them. The whole world is nuts.
As a funny aside, Switzerland used to have no patents, and yet was in compliance with international treaties like the Paris Convention because they treated foreign inventors exactly the same as they did their local inventors: no patent protection for anyone. Their reasoning was that Switzerland had so few local inventors to protect, and they wanted to steal technology from other countries. It was in fact your country that first got pissed off at them and threatened all sorts of economic pressure if they didn't implement a patent law, because they were upset at the Swiss stealing German inventions.
"Excuse me, but I am a patent attorney, and you're wrong."
Considering I hold several patents, and the process has worked exactly opposite of how you describe in the seven years of filing for those patents, I think you might want to get a refund from your school.
Really? You're seriously claiming that you filed a patent application, and the only thing the USPTO said was "prove that your claimed invention is new, useful, and nonobvious" and they waited for a response from you before issuing it? That they didn't issue an Office Action that contained one or more rejections over prior art for you to rebut? That's what you're claiming?
If so, I'm calling you a liar. An easily provable one too: identify one or more of your patents. The file histories are publicly available.
You are not saying much. If a file a patent, do *I* have to file proof, or does *THE PTO* have to prove me wrong, and if they can't/don't they have to award the patent?
THAT is what you said - it is not quite clear, since it is a reply to a reply - so I would just like you to confirm.
The latter - the PTO has to prove you wrong, and if they can't, they have to issue the patent. It's because of 35 USC 102, which says that an applicant "shall be entitled to a patent" subject to the requirements of the Patent Act. It's similar to the "shall issue" firearms licensing statutes that require the police to issue a permit unless they can prove that you're unfit.
Quite apart from nit-picking though, it would be a smear if you didn't have any evidence. But such evidence abounds; that you don't feel the need to spell it out in excruciating detail at every opportunity is different.
I'm sure you can provide a link to some of that evidence, since it's abounding all over the place?
Excuse me, when you file a patent you have to prove THAT YOU HAVE A CASE (for getting a new patent awarded). You describe it the other way around, we (the PTO, whoever) have to prove that it's not a valid patent, with a default of "award it"???
Nuts! (Sorry, but that's how I describe this reversal or who has to prove what).
Excuse me, but I am a patent attorney, and you're wrong. Maybe you're describing the way you'd like the law to be. It's currently the way I said.
It's a little obvious, don't you think? If you described the problem to someone involved in the field, they couldn't come up with this?
That's like saying "he's a little guilty, don't you think? I mean, look at him, isn't he guilty looking?"
Obviousness is a legal conclusion that must be supported by evidence - currently, you have no evidence that it's the right conclusion, just a gut feeling that's based on hindsight. To show something is obvious, you need to show that one or more pieces of prior art that existed at the time of filing, alone or in combination, teach or suggest each and every element in the claims. So, for example, the claim quoted above includes "receiving at a first server system" - that's easy... here's a patent from 1995 that shows a server system receiving information. It then says "information related to users of a social network site hosted on a second server system". That's easy, too - we can go back to the original Myspace or Facebook pages. So now, in combination, we've got the entire first line.
Then keep going.
If you can do that for everything in the claim, you can prove it's obvious, rather than just alleging it.
Now if the US supreme court could apply the same level of common sense and justice to the software patent problem it would be a real turn on (I couldn't help myself).
Maybe you should've read the article rather than rushing to pull out your penis joke. The decision here was that a person of ordinary skill in the art reading the patent wouldn't have known which drug caused erections, and therefore, the patent didn't include enough written disclosure to enable a person of ordinary skill to practice the invention.
That doesn't really apply with software patents, because if you're a programmer who can't follow a flow chart, then you probably don't represent the skill of an ordinary person in the art.
It has nothing to do with what Apple does or does not think. In fact, the court wasn't even forcing them to "lie" or even apologize, properly speaking, it is forcing them to publicly set the record straight about the facts of the case, which is that Samsung was found to not be copying them after Apple claimed they were. It's a correction of the public record, not an apology.
... except that they also had to remove the statement of facts that were also in the public record, namely the quotes from the judge's opinion and the statement about other cases. "Too much truth" apparently was just as bad as "too little".
New data released on Thursday by market research firm Strategy Analytics finds that Samsung's Galaxy S III was the world's top-selling smartphone model in the third quarter this year, displacing Apple's iPhone for the first time in years.
... during the quarter in which Apple had announced that the iPhone 5 was coming soon, so people held off buying the iPhone 4S. In fact, if you add the iPhone 5 sales to the iPhone 4S sales for the quarter, the result tops the Galaxy S III by 4 million.
However, being driven out of business is not enough for R Buckminster Fuller's estate, who has filed yet another lawsuit that they own all rights to the name "buckyballs" despite widespread use of the term.
... yes, widespread use of the term when referring to R Buckminster Fuller's discovery. Come on, Subby, that's like saying "McDonald's claims they own rights to the name 'Big Mac' despite widespread use of the term referring to a fast food burger from McDonald's."
No. Don't stop calling them 'patents'. Because this one has 'brought to you by a patent lawyer' written all over it! It's as broad and vague in the scope as it can be.
Just because you don't understand design patents doesn't mean they're broad in scope or vague. For example, you note:
It doesn't even mention proportions.
... which implies that you believe that they should have mentioned specific lengths and widths. But, see 37 CFR 1.153: "No description, other than a reference to the drawing, is ordinarily required."
That's not necessary with a design patent. Rather, the proportions are the ones shown in a figure. Break out a ruler and a calculator, and that ratio is the proportion claimed. Deviate substantially, and you don't infringe. What's substantially? Enough that an ordinary observer wouldn't confuse the infringing product and the claimed design. So while 4:3.01 wouldn't cut it, 16:9 may, and 2.40:1 definitely would.
If you look at traditional trademarked or patented design - say the coke bottle or the x-box - the designers went out of their way to create a unique shape. The author of this patent went out of his way to create a generic shape. The fact that it 'only applies to appearance' only makes it worse!
If it were generic, then you could point to other examples of the same shape as shown in all 8 figures, right? And bear in mind that something like D562285 doesn't show the same shape, and was even cited as being different.
Moto offered Apple the same percentage that they offer everyone.
[Citation needed]
As you note, everyone else Motorola offered a license to traded patents. It's unclear whether Motorola first asked for 2.25% from them and then negotiated, or whether Motorola identified patents they were interested in licensing (because Motorola's past negotiations are, quite reasonably, confidential. They certainly aren't releasing them). What is clear is that Motorola has never charged 2.25% for those patents. Not once.
As stated, we have no evidence that Motorola ever asked for 2.25% from anyone, and unless Motorola releases evidence of its negotiations with other manufacturers, I can't see how your claim can be supported.
No more then a judge would not have the power over other countries judgement, oh wait that already happened in the microsoft case.
Going on the assumption that you're not trolling, but have simply been fed the wrong information, I'll help: the judge there didn't override the other country's judgement or otherwise exceed his jurisdiction. Rather, in Germany, it's not a court that enforces an injunction, but a plaintiff. The judge here placed an injunction on Google ordering them not to exercise their power to enforce the German injunction.
Here's an analogy... A German court says "you win this case, and will receive $10 fro the defendant. But first, you have to come here, visit the clerk's office, and sign this form." The US court then says, "you aren't allowed to travel to Germany." It's not exceeding its jurisdiction, nor is it overturning the German decision... but you're nonetheless stopped from enforcing that earlier judgement.
From a policy perspective, it makes sense too... The Microsoft-Google case was already going on in this country, when Google tried to run around it by doing a fast-track decision in Germany. That's not fair, because it allows you to game the system by filing in multiple places simultaneously on the same case, taking the winning judgement and dropping all of the others. In this country, to prevent exactly that, we have systems of estoppel and res judicata that makes someone bound to a decision by one court on an issue - or bound to argument they make on that issue in court - even if they try to go to another court. There's no such international rule, but it still should be prevented in the interests of fairness.
Considering that you're calling her a cow because she stopped talking to you, she did the right thing.
I disagree. If you personally distribute naked pictures of yourself to unintended recipients because you're too stupid to use privacy settings or a sharing method you understand, you have no cause to treat the recipients like creeps for informing you.
Similarly, if someone stops talking to you, you have no cause to call them a cow.
Furthermore, consider that even with only his side of the story, he still comes off creepy: she thought he was a creep, stopped talking to him, so he calls her names... which is the sort of thing a creep would do. Hence, it's just as likely that he was a creep, she stopped talking to him, and he now continues being a creep. So, good for her.
I had a female friend who accidentally shared naked photos (showing everything) of herself with me (and publicly) on Facebook. She was trying to create an account for only her boyfriend to see, but not being very computer-literate, screwed up the privacy settings and publicly exposed some obviously very private photos. I immediately just politely and discretely informed her that these photos were visible, and how to fix it. For my effort, she immediately decided I was some kind of creep, blocked me, and never spoke to me again. Cow. But at least I did the right thing, I think.
Considering that you're calling her a cow because she stopped talking to you, she did the right thing.
I wonder if a creative judge wouldn't have an original redress, like:
On apple.com, and all your international sites, in the languages you already display, you must display the apology in a click-thru manner, such as NO customer to any apple property is unaware that
Dear customers, we've been found before British court to have falsely accused samsung of theft. Moreover we've been found also by the british court, in contempt of court for not informing our british customers of such.
Please click here to continue to your normal apple site.
They obviously value publicity far more than money, and should be hit appropriately.
There's a good argument that the judge wouldn't have the power to order them to change any non-.co.uk sites, as they're not under his jurisdiction.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of implications of this viewpoint, and if everyone (especially Congress) could keep it straight, our IP laws would be a lot more sane -- and would tend to achieve rather than undermine the underlying goal. In the case of patent law, one implication of the real goal is that we can measure the effectiveness of the system by how often inventors search the patent database looking for solutions to problems, or for ideas to spark new inventions.
Though I agree with the rest of your post, I think your suggested test is too narrow - patents also allow inventors to publish white papers, theses, functional specifications, flow charts, etc. without destroying their IP protection, unlike trade secrets. Accordingly, we should also measure the effectiveness of the system by how often inventors search those for ideas.
1. This was something I meant to ask in a previous informative /. encounter with you: is that damages limit per patent, per holder of a set of patents, or for all patents infringed? It's one thing if you're violating only a few patents, but the article makes the claim that a smartphone is covered by a quarter-million of them. If I get sued by a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand different patent holders....
Per device type... Since patent damges are limited to a reasonable royalty, you can't very well pay 10% royalties to one hundred people. So, when the 10th patent owner comes around, you say "I'm already paying x% to these 9 guys... all that's left for you is y%." Yes, this means that the first patent owner who sues you will get the biggest bite of the pot, but that encourages speedy resolution of suits. Additionally, you can return to court to rejudge damages and get your royalty payments reduced if it turns out that 10% to the first guy wasn't reasonable, in light of the other royalty payments.
The important thing to remember is that patent damages are compensatory in nature, not punitive. No one wins if you get pushed into bankruptcy, because you go out of business and aren't paying royalties. It's better for everyone involved that you make at least a tiny bit of profit and keep paying license fees, and so courts and patent owners will work to revise royalty payment percentages as necessary.
2. Another thing I've noticed is slashdot posters who are claiming they are specifically being told by their legal departments that they should NOT look at existing patents (and this is not something new). If this is endemic, what does it mean for the part of the purpose of the patent system whereby future inventors are supposed to build upon the work of previous inventors rather than waste resources reinventing the wheel? Does it need fixing and how could it be fixed?
The justification behind it is that it's impossible to prove that you willfully infringed a patent if you had no knowledge of it, and damages don't start until you're aware. So, for example, if Company A has patent A, issued in 2000, and you read it in 2001, you could be liable for damages all the way back to 2001, even though they sue you today. Otherwise, Company A can only get damages starting today onwards... and if you're quick and push out a software patch (for example) disabling that functionality, their damages could literally be for a few days of use.
The primary counterargument is that patents are a pretty poor place to learn about the technology of others... Rather, you learn about that technology by reading white papers, reading theses, reading functional specifications, and taking apart the technology to see how it works. And, without the protection of patents, companies would want to surpress all of that and keep them trade secrets, with heavy NDA licenses just to use the tech.
That said, yes, it sucks. The reform needed isn't on the patent-gettin' side, but on the patent-suin' side (which could also use some damage reforms that would surpress patent trolling). For example, if Company A knew about you in 2001 and sat on their hands letting the damages clock tick up for years, then maybe they should be estopped from claiming damages for that period. Alternately, if Company A didn't know about you in 2001 (but you knew about their patent) and didn't find out about you until 2011, then maybe you were so tiny for those 10 years that they weren't really damaged much, and their royalties should be a few thousandths of a percent for that period... or less.
No, I had no office objections ever filed. Probably because I make absolutely unique things.
But it was as simple as filing my patent, paying the application fee, and waiting. Issued patents. No challenges, no questions, NOT ONE THING.
Couple years later, patent acceptance in the mail.
"If so, I'm calling you a liar. An easily provable one too: identify one or more of your patents."
My NDA from the Department of Agriculture forbids that, unless you carry DoD clearance issued via investigation higher than ANACI.
Give me that and we'll talk.
Bullshiat.
First, all issued patents are public documents, published under 37 CFR 1.11. They are open to the public for inspection, and cannot be under any non-disclosure agreements or secrecy orders, by definition. If your so-called "issued patent" was under a secrecy order under 37 CFR 5.2, it would be just an application, not issued by definition, and it would not have ever been examined. Got it? There are no such things as secret patents - there are applications that the military stamps "secret" on, that go into a locked file cabinet and never, ever get inspected. They aren't issued - they're withheld from being issued. If that's what you're claiming to have, then it is not and never was a patent.
Second, why would the DoA even care about a DoD clearance? Somehow, I doubt your "method for fingering a pig" really is crucial to national secrecy.
Nonsense. Patents apply to everybody. There's no exception for people who "only" make 1-10 units. Patents literally forbid you to tinker in your own home and then sell the item you just invented, if someone paid a fee and lodged a vague sounding description about something roughly similar already.
Except that patent infringement damages are going to be limited, by definition, to 100% of your revenue at most, and will be more likely around 5-20%. And so, since it will cost a company around $150,000-250,000 to file and win that patent suit, and their potential damages if they win are around $20-30, with a maximum in the hundreds, no one is going to enforce a patent over that many units.
I think the point is that Seagate is a subsidiary of Samsung, and the "ah-ha moment" he talks about in that post trial interview where after he takes the role of making the case for Apple, may have been more like "ah-ha, I can get some revenge."
Understood - I was simply correcting GP poster who believed since it was a patent case, you could presume bias in any other patent case. His premise was false, so his conclusion was invalid. It could still be true for other reasons, but not for that one.
I've just invented a knerbweg for throoling a morginated comdowuler via a plirkitwang.
Can you disprove that?
Sure... It's unpatentable under 35 USC 112 because your terms are undefined, and you'd receive a rejection on those grounds. You can rebut it by providing explicit definitions.
I mean, really... You think the USPTO never thought of that?
Since the cases he never fully disclosed involved patents, you can pretty much assume bias in a patent case and rescind the verdict, for reasons of tainted jury.
From here:
According to Hogan, when Seagate hired him in the 1980s and he moved from Colorado to California, his new employer agreed to split the cost of paying off the mortgage on his Colorado home. But after Hogan was laid off in the early 1990s, he told us, Seagate claimed he owed the company that money. Hogan said he sued Seagate for fraud, Seagate countersued, and he ultimately declared personal bankruptcy to protect his house."
That suit against Seagate was over breach of contract and fraud, not patents.
In that case I still keep my "Nuts!" comment, but no longer point it at your comment, but at the patent law. And you have my sympathies - I think I like MY job even more now...
I don't believe in that patent stuff at all anyway - I'm German, after all, and the way we got to where we are was through COPYING (British machines). I would be a hypocrite to defend patents now, just because now WE have the machines and somebody else copies them. The whole world is nuts.
As a funny aside, Switzerland used to have no patents, and yet was in compliance with international treaties like the Paris Convention because they treated foreign inventors exactly the same as they did their local inventors: no patent protection for anyone. Their reasoning was that Switzerland had so few local inventors to protect, and they wanted to steal technology from other countries. It was in fact your country that first got pissed off at them and threatened all sorts of economic pressure if they didn't implement a patent law, because they were upset at the Swiss stealing German inventions.
So, I guess everyone's a hypocrite. :)
"Excuse me, but I am a patent attorney, and you're wrong."
Considering I hold several patents, and the process has worked exactly opposite of how you describe in the seven years of filing for those patents, I think you might want to get a refund from your school.
Really? You're seriously claiming that you filed a patent application, and the only thing the USPTO said was "prove that your claimed invention is new, useful, and nonobvious" and they waited for a response from you before issuing it? That they didn't issue an Office Action that contained one or more rejections over prior art for you to rebut? That's what you're claiming?
If so, I'm calling you a liar. An easily provable one too: identify one or more of your patents. The file histories are publicly available.
You are not saying much. If a file a patent, do *I* have to file proof, or does *THE PTO* have to prove me wrong, and if they can't/don't they have to award the patent?
THAT is what you said - it is not quite clear, since it is a reply to a reply - so I would just like you to confirm.
The latter - the PTO has to prove you wrong, and if they can't, they have to issue the patent. It's because of 35 USC 102, which says that an applicant "shall be entitled to a patent" subject to the requirements of the Patent Act. It's similar to the "shall issue" firearms licensing statutes that require the police to issue a permit unless they can prove that you're unfit.
Quite apart from nit-picking though, it would be a smear if you didn't have any evidence. But such evidence abounds; that you don't feel the need to spell it out in excruciating detail at every opportunity is different.
I'm sure you can provide a link to some of that evidence, since it's abounding all over the place?
Excuse me, when you file a patent you have to prove THAT YOU HAVE A CASE (for getting a new patent awarded). You describe it the other way around, we (the PTO, whoever) have to prove that it's not a valid patent, with a default of "award it"???
Nuts! (Sorry, but that's how I describe this reversal or who has to prove what).
Excuse me, but I am a patent attorney, and you're wrong. Maybe you're describing the way you'd like the law to be. It's currently the way I said.
It's a little obvious, don't you think? If you described the problem to someone involved in the field, they couldn't come up with this?
That's like saying "he's a little guilty, don't you think? I mean, look at him, isn't he guilty looking?"
Obviousness is a legal conclusion that must be supported by evidence - currently, you have no evidence that it's the right conclusion, just a gut feeling that's based on hindsight. To show something is obvious, you need to show that one or more pieces of prior art that existed at the time of filing, alone or in combination, teach or suggest each and every element in the claims. So, for example, the claim quoted above includes "receiving at a first server system" - that's easy... here's a patent from 1995 that shows a server system receiving information. It then says "information related to users of a social network site hosted on a second server system". That's easy, too - we can go back to the original Myspace or Facebook pages. So now, in combination, we've got the entire first line.
Then keep going.
If you can do that for everything in the claim, you can prove it's obvious, rather than just alleging it.
The lawyers almost certainly would have thought they were being explicit enough to meet the rules
And that is why you do not yet lawyers write patent applications.
And careful attention to detail is why you don't let anonymous cowards write them either.
Now if the US supreme court could apply the same level of common sense and justice to the software patent problem it would be a real turn on (I couldn't help myself).
Maybe you should've read the article rather than rushing to pull out your penis joke. The decision here was that a person of ordinary skill in the art reading the patent wouldn't have known which drug caused erections, and therefore, the patent didn't include enough written disclosure to enable a person of ordinary skill to practice the invention.
That doesn't really apply with software patents, because if you're a programmer who can't follow a flow chart, then you probably don't represent the skill of an ordinary person in the art.
It has nothing to do with what Apple does or does not think. In fact, the court wasn't even forcing them to "lie" or even apologize, properly speaking, it is forcing them to publicly set the record straight about the facts of the case, which is that Samsung was found to not be copying them after Apple claimed they were. It's a correction of the public record, not an apology.
... except that they also had to remove the statement of facts that were also in the public record, namely the quotes from the judge's opinion and the statement about other cases. "Too much truth" apparently was just as bad as "too little".
New data released on Thursday by market research firm Strategy Analytics finds that Samsung's Galaxy S III was the world's top-selling smartphone model in the third quarter this year, displacing Apple's iPhone for the first time in years.
... during the quarter in which Apple had announced that the iPhone 5 was coming soon, so people held off buying the iPhone 4S. In fact, if you add the iPhone 5 sales to the iPhone 4S sales for the quarter, the result tops the Galaxy S III by 4 million.
However, being driven out of business is not enough for R Buckminster Fuller's estate, who has filed yet another lawsuit that they own all rights to the name "buckyballs" despite widespread use of the term.
... yes, widespread use of the term when referring to R Buckminster Fuller's discovery. Come on, Subby, that's like saying "McDonald's claims they own rights to the name 'Big Mac' despite widespread use of the term referring to a fast food burger from McDonald's."
No. Don't stop calling them 'patents'. Because this one has 'brought to you by a patent lawyer' written all over it! It's as broad and vague in the scope as it can be.
Just because you don't understand design patents doesn't mean they're broad in scope or vague. For example, you note:
It doesn't even mention proportions.
... which implies that you believe that they should have mentioned specific lengths and widths. But, see 37 CFR 1.153: "No description, other than a reference to the drawing, is ordinarily required."
That's not necessary with a design patent. Rather, the proportions are the ones shown in a figure. Break out a ruler and a calculator, and that ratio is the proportion claimed. Deviate substantially, and you don't infringe. What's substantially? Enough that an ordinary observer wouldn't confuse the infringing product and the claimed design. So while 4:3.01 wouldn't cut it, 16:9 may, and 2.40:1 definitely would.
If you look at traditional trademarked or patented design - say the coke bottle or the x-box - the designers went out of their way to create a unique shape. The author of this patent went out of his way to create a generic shape. The fact that it 'only applies to appearance' only makes it worse!
If it were generic, then you could point to other examples of the same shape as shown in all 8 figures, right? And bear in mind that something like D562285 doesn't show the same shape, and was even cited as being different.
You sir, are either ill informed or a fanboy.
Moto offered Apple the same percentage that they offer everyone.
[Citation needed]
As you note, everyone else Motorola offered a license to traded patents. It's unclear whether Motorola first asked for 2.25% from them and then negotiated, or whether Motorola identified patents they were interested in licensing (because Motorola's past negotiations are, quite reasonably, confidential. They certainly aren't releasing them). What is clear is that Motorola has never charged 2.25% for those patents. Not once.
As stated, we have no evidence that Motorola ever asked for 2.25% from anyone, and unless Motorola releases evidence of its negotiations with other manufacturers, I can't see how your claim can be supported.
No more then a judge would not have the power over other countries judgement, oh wait that already happened in the microsoft case.
Going on the assumption that you're not trolling, but have simply been fed the wrong information, I'll help: the judge there didn't override the other country's judgement or otherwise exceed his jurisdiction. Rather, in Germany, it's not a court that enforces an injunction, but a plaintiff. The judge here placed an injunction on Google ordering them not to exercise their power to enforce the German injunction.
Here's an analogy... A German court says "you win this case, and will receive $10 fro the defendant. But first, you have to come here, visit the clerk's office, and sign this form." The US court then says, "you aren't allowed to travel to Germany." It's not exceeding its jurisdiction, nor is it overturning the German decision... but you're nonetheless stopped from enforcing that earlier judgement.
From a policy perspective, it makes sense too... The Microsoft-Google case was already going on in this country, when Google tried to run around it by doing a fast-track decision in Germany. That's not fair, because it allows you to game the system by filing in multiple places simultaneously on the same case, taking the winning judgement and dropping all of the others. In this country, to prevent exactly that, we have systems of estoppel and res judicata that makes someone bound to a decision by one court on an issue - or bound to argument they make on that issue in court - even if they try to go to another court. There's no such international rule, but it still should be prevented in the interests of fairness.
Clearer?
If you're going to make a claim like that, you might want to spare thirty seconds to check out the actual web sites.
US Site: No picture scaling UK Site: Picture scales to hide the bottom of the page.
Interestingly, it seems that every country site for Apple except the US one does the picture scaling.
Considering that you're calling her a cow because she stopped talking to you, she did the right thing.
I disagree. If you personally distribute naked pictures of yourself to unintended recipients because you're too stupid to use privacy settings or a sharing method you understand, you have no cause to treat the recipients like creeps for informing you.
Similarly, if someone stops talking to you, you have no cause to call them a cow.
Furthermore, consider that even with only his side of the story, he still comes off creepy: she thought he was a creep, stopped talking to him, so he calls her names... which is the sort of thing a creep would do. Hence, it's just as likely that he was a creep, she stopped talking to him, and he now continues being a creep. So, good for her.
I had a female friend who accidentally shared naked photos (showing everything) of herself with me (and publicly) on Facebook. She was trying to create an account for only her boyfriend to see, but not being very computer-literate, screwed up the privacy settings and publicly exposed some obviously very private photos. I immediately just politely and discretely informed her that these photos were visible, and how to fix it. For my effort, she immediately decided I was some kind of creep, blocked me, and never spoke to me again. Cow. But at least I did the right thing, I think.
Considering that you're calling her a cow because she stopped talking to you, she did the right thing.
I wonder if a creative judge wouldn't have an original redress, like:
On apple.com, and all your international sites, in the languages you already display, you must display the apology in a click-thru manner, such as NO customer to any apple property is unaware that
Dear customers, we've been found before British court to have falsely accused samsung of theft. Moreover we've been found also by the british court, in contempt of court for not informing our british customers of such.
Please click here to continue to your normal apple site.
They obviously value publicity far more than money, and should be hit appropriately.
There's a good argument that the judge wouldn't have the power to order them to change any non-.co.uk sites, as they're not under his jurisdiction.