One of them is the icon grid patent. To wit: "The ornamental design for a [GUI] for a display screen or portion thereof, as shown and described" and then they give a picture of their icon grid.
Correct. Showing the key features: the specific shape and design of the icons, their arrangement on the screen with text labeling below, the position of the dock on the screen, and the icons in the dock. All of these specific features together--not merely a "grid of icons" (colorful or otherwise)--were at issue in the Apple-Samsung lawsuit. Remember, this is a design patent--a patent not just on individual features, but on the way in which they are combined to create a distinctive design. So prior art would have to demonstrate the same features combined in a very similar way.
The specific color scheme and design of the individual icons were also at issue in the lawsuit, but were not part of this patent. These are part of Apple's "trade dress" which is covered under trademark law. For this, prior art is irrelevant; Apple just has to show that their product has an appearance that is distinctive, widely known, and recognizable as an Apple product. In contrast to a design patent, which expires and enters the public domain after 14 years, trademarks, including trade dress, last indefinitely, so long as the company continues to use them--but in contrast to design patents, the company loses the rights to its trademarks if it does not vigorously defend them in court.
Apple's patent is not a general patent on multitouch, but on a particular way of implementing multitouch. This is why Samsung can argue that their multitouch does not infringe upon Apple's multitouch, as their algorithm is slightly less convenient for developers. Apple is arguing that the difference is an inconsequential variation on Apple's method.
So simply showing that somebody else did multi-touch before does not establish prior art. That is not a matter of dispute. To establish prior art, Samsung's would need to show that all of the key features of Apple's way of doing multitouch (or at least, the ones that Samsung is accused of infringing) were anticipated by prior art--such as how the operating system can figure out, from an elliptical area of finger contact that is a substantial fraction of the width of the screen, what specific point on the screen the user is trying to indicate, what screen objects the user intends that touch to be associated with, and what the trajectory of that point is over time, and how that noisy trajectory is interpreted in terms of specific gestures.
Single view encompassing entire display Icons on uniform square tiles with color different from background and slightly rounded corners of specific radius Four columns of icons Dock at bottom of screen denoted by distinctive gray surface holding 4 icons
Gestures shown are two-handed gestures. No examples of Apple's distinctive one-handed gestures such as are required for use on hand-held device. While it hard to tell for certain from the image, the tracking of the touch appears considerably cruder, and in particular to lack the precision required for a small hand-held device, suggesting that it is not using Apple's algorithms, the key feature of which is that they include methods optimized to provide useful tracking of the pad of a finger on a small touch display. It is hard to see how any reasonable jury would consider this to be prior art for Apple's specific multitouch methods.
Actually, there have been studies using objective criteria of expertise, such as number of peer-reviewed publications in the field of climate science.
But of course, the true conspiracy theorist will just insist that is because pro-AGW scientists are conspiring to prevent those who disagree from getting published.
I'd like to see a study to test the hypothesis that anybody who puts more than 3 non-acronym words in one paragraph in ALL CAPITALS is likely to believe in one or more conspiracy theories.
Actually, the thimerosal theory of autism was not very plausible even at the outset, because a) the amount of mercury was very small, and b) there have been enough instances of environmental mercury poisoning that the symptoms are well known, and they do not include autism. It was never a serious scientific theory. Thimerosal was removed from most vaccinations simply on the general concern that even though there was no actual evidence of harm, the possibility could not be entirely excluded that it might produce some subtle adverse effect (like the slight reduction in IQ that has been reported even with low doses of lead).
Or in other words, disinterested scientists should not advise us on the impact of global warming and how to ameliorate it--they should leave this job up to the fossil fuel industry and the public relation agencies and politicians who depend upon that industry for financial support.
Many people with Asperger's are perfectly fine. The may not be very good in social situations, but they have intense interests that can be very rewarding and can lead them into good careers. I imagine that a substantial fraction of my classmates at MIT would be diagnosed with Asperger's today. But there are also people with autism who can't speak, who are constantly in emotional turmoil, and who require constant care.
Autism is considered a developmental disorder. But people on the autism spectrum don't necessarily stop developing. In clinical trials, typically something like a third of the patients in the placebo group show significant improvement. Many parents of children with autism are constantly trying one "treatment" or another, and when their child happens to show improvement, they credit whatever they tried last. They tell other parents, and it becomes a fad. And there are always doctors willing to offer the latest fad treatment--at a price.
There is a gastrointestinal peptide called secretin. It regulates bicarbonate secretion in the intestines. Three autistic kids were each given a single injection of secretin (they also had GI problems, which seem to be common in autism, although nobody is completely sure whether it is part of the disorder) and it was widely reported that their autistic behavior improved dramatically. There was a huge secretin fad. Over a thousand kids were treated with secretin. The company that made it couldn't keep up with the demand. Eventually, the controlled studies were done: the secretin group got better; so did the placebo group. No difference. The experimenters couldn't believe it. There were more studies: higher doses, more injections, secretin from different species. I even found one study that put it in an ointment and smeared it on the skin. None of them worked better than placebo. As a result of the secretin fad, we now know a great deal about secretin and autism--and what we know is that it doesn't work.
Fortunately, it seems like secretin is pretty much harmless. But a lot of "autism treatments" are not. There are still kids being treated with chelating agents, based on a long-debunked notion that autism has something to do with mercury poisoning. But chelating agents have serious risk of side effects, and can be dangerous if misused, and their have been some very bad consequences.
Nobody knows yet if this will treat autism in humans. A major problem for developing autism therapy is that there are no validated animal models (although there are quite a few candidates). The problem is, what constitutes autism in an animal? The most troubling symptoms of autism in humans relate to social-emotional behaviors that have no strong correlates in animals. So what we have in terms of "autistic behavior" in animals are things along the lines of "does the 'autistic' mouse sniff the other mouse less than normal?" But it turns out that mouse social behavior is pretty fragile: all sorts of genetic and pharmacological manipulations screw up mouse social behavior, and chances are that they are not all valid models of autism.
Now, an animal model does not have to be exactly like a human to be useful. The key question is, does a manipulation that normalizes the "autistic" animal behavior also improve the core symptoms of autism in humans? This is an area that is very much in its infancy, so nobody really knows.
Part of the problem is that we don't know what is really wrong in autism. There are clear neurochemical differences, but we don't yet know if these are a cause of the behavioral deficits in autism. One possibility is that the damage in autism occurs very early, even before birth. The brain is just miswired, and there is nothing much that can be done about it after symptoms emerge. In this case, an intervention would have to be very early, perhaps even in utero, to work. Another possibility is that the fundamental wiring of the brain is OK (on a gross level, there is no evidence of major damage, although there is evidence for subtle changes in what neurons are where), but that the signaling between neurons is off in some way that can be correctable, in which case there might be some dietary, pharmacological, or gene therapy manipulation that could bring function closer to what we think of as normal.
And of course, there are likely multiple types of autism (probably caused by different mutations), so some forms might be treatable late, while others might not.
And if your collection of CDs or vinyl LPs burns, you can't restore your music either. But sensible people back up their hard drives. Or you can pay Apple for iTunes Match, and Apple will back it up for you. If you don't like Apple, Amazon offers a similar service.
I'm quite sure that the thought didn't even enter Steve's head. It was never his problem.
No, and Steve doubtless realized that it was not actually a problem for his customers, either. If Bruce Willis wants to leave his music collection to his daughters, all he actually has to do is copy it onto a hard disk and hand it to them. Apple is not going to go after them, and even if they were unwise enough to brag about it in public, there's not a whole lot that the RIAA could do to them either. This is not a matter of putting songs on Bittorrent, where the music industry's lawyers could argue that they are liable for lost sales if everybody who bittorrented those songs were to buy the album instead. At most, Bruce Willis's estate would be liable for the actual cost of the songs--hardly even worth the trouble and expense of a lawsuit, not to mention the bad publicity. For that matter, if Willis's daughters had chosen to maintain his Apple ID after his death, it's unlikely that Apple would have objected.
Bruce Willis has decided to fight for the right to will his music collection to his kids openly and legally, rather than doing it under the table. This is a principled stand, and it might ultimately lead to a more rational status of electronic property. Good for him! But in practice, it doesn't really affect your ability to pass your music onto your kids after you die--or before, for that matter.
Just like Apple actively studied Palm, Windows Mobile, Nokia, and tons of other designs and massively imitated them. That's how product design works.
And if one of those companies sued Apple, and produced equally compelling evidence that Apple was actively trying to copy those devices, those companies would likely receive large judgments as well. That's how intellectual property law works.
But it seems pretty unlikely. After all, Samsung and other companies were trying to copy Apple because, even though they had been in the phone market for years, Apple's designs were far more successful. Apple had far less motivation to copy these less successful companies--particularly considering that the nearly universal industry wisdom when Apple released the iPhone was that there was at most a small market for touch phones without keyboards
There is no legal requirement for designs to be original.
When other companies have trademarked and patented designs, there is indeed. That's how intellectual property law works.
Cellular phones have used the image of a telephone handset combined with the color green for over 20 years to indicate "making a call". And icons with rounded corners have been around for as long. Apple did not invent any of this and they do not deserve ownership.
Yet it was obvious to the jury that Samsung's icons were far more like Apple's than either Apple's or Samsung's icons were like the green telephone buttons on older phones, and documentation was produced demonstrating that Samsung had studied Apple's designs and tried to copy them. Moreover, the jury saw evidence that other companies's did not infringe upon Apple's designs in the same way. So it was not inadvertent overlap of universal industry practice but a deliberate pattern of copying that went far beyond that.
So you are saying that Samsung deliberately planned on losing $1bn?
No, just that Samsung recklessly chose to go beyond the bounds of copying that other manufacturers, including their operating system developer Google thought reasonable. So it's hardly surprising that a jury had the same reaction that Google did.
Because Samsung's designs already were original. They shared a few design cues with Apple phones, but nothing that should constitute a violation. If these kinds of standards were imposed universally, all the tech we use would be completely incompatible and randomly different.
In the trial, evidence was produced that Samsung actively studied Apple's designs and tried to imitate them, so it's hardly surprising that a jury agreed with Apple that Samsung's designs are not original. And certainly other manufactures have managed to come up with perfectly functional phones that do not infringe upon Apple's design patents (indeed, the jury found that some of of Samsung's devices avoid infringing on some of Apple's design patents). Compatibility among different devices is assured by standards to which Apple and other manufacturers have contributed. But compatibility does not require, for example, that icons be the same shape, use a similar color screen, and be similarly arranged to those on the iPhone. So it is perfectly possible to construct a fully functional smartphone that does not infringe upon Apple's patents.
Sounds like typical Amazon efficiency. They planned the stock of the Kindle Fire to run right up until the introduction of the new model, and hit it pretty close. They don't want to just list the old one as out of stock, because then they would have a backlog of orders that could never be filled, and they'd incur additional expense contacting customers and switching the order to the new one (which might not be exactly the same price).
Actually, he was talking about why they decided that Samsung's "460" patent, which "covers a method of transmitting emails, with and without embedded images, from a mobile phone with a built-in camera" was not invalidated by prior art. And indeed, the jury did find that Apple had not proved that patent invalid
Patch clamping isolated cells is not all that hard. It has become the standard method of single-cell recording, and automated devices to do it have been available for years. This device automatically patch clamps neurons in brain slices, which is trickier because it's harder to see what you are doing.
Yes, it is such a tragedy, because the dividing line is completely unclear now. Many people (presumably Samsung's lawyers included) did not believe that there was a violation
Because, for a start, if patents were completely nullified worldwide, those products would still exist.
You said, "Seems like they had it right back in 1830 when the patent office was planning on closing it's doors for good, claiming that there was nothing left to invent."
So if nothing worth patenting was invented since 1830, you wouldn't mind doing without them, would you?
And no, it is not necessarily the case that those products would still exist. In many cases, a company is only willing to take the risk and make the investment to bring a product to market because their patent guarantees them a temporary monopoly. Some of those products were invented by individuals who worked as inventors only because they could get paid for their patents. Without patents, technology development would have proceeded more slowly, because rather than patenting and disclosing their inventions, companies would have found it advantageous to keep their discoveries as trade secrets (indeed, this was the problem that patent law was created to solve) rather than sharing them with other companies that might enhance them with additional innovations. Less sharing of information means slower progress of technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct. Showing the key features: the specific shape and design of the icons, their arrangement on the screen with text labeling below, the position of the dock on the screen, and the icons in the dock. All of these specific features together--not merely a "grid of icons" (colorful or otherwise)--were at issue in the Apple-Samsung lawsuit. Remember, this is a design patent--a patent not just on individual features, but on the way in which they are combined to create a distinctive design. So prior art would have to demonstrate the same features combined in a very similar way.
The specific color scheme and design of the individual icons were also at issue in the lawsuit, but were not part of this patent. These are part of Apple's "trade dress" which is covered under trademark law. For this, prior art is irrelevant; Apple just has to show that their product has an appearance that is distinctive, widely known, and recognizable as an Apple product. In contrast to a design patent, which expires and enters the public domain after 14 years, trademarks, including trade dress, last indefinitely, so long as the company continues to use them--but in contrast to design patents, the company loses the rights to its trademarks if it does not vigorously defend them in court.
Apple's patent is not a general patent on multitouch, but on a particular way of implementing multitouch. This is why Samsung can argue that their multitouch does not infringe upon Apple's multitouch, as their algorithm is slightly less convenient for developers. Apple is arguing that the difference is an inconsequential variation on Apple's method.
So simply showing that somebody else did multi-touch before does not establish prior art. That is not a matter of dispute. To establish prior art, Samsung's would need to show that all of the key features of Apple's way of doing multitouch (or at least, the ones that Samsung is accused of infringing) were anticipated by prior art--such as how the operating system can figure out, from an elliptical area of finger contact that is a substantial fraction of the width of the screen, what specific point on the screen the user is trying to indicate, what screen objects the user intends that touch to be associated with, and what the trajectory of that point is over time, and how that noisy trajectory is interpreted in terms of specific gestures.
Single view encompassing entire display
Icons on uniform square tiles with color different from background and slightly rounded corners of specific radius
Four columns of icons
Dock at bottom of screen denoted by distinctive gray surface holding 4 icons
Gestures shown are two-handed gestures. No examples of Apple's distinctive one-handed gestures such as are required for use on hand-held device. While it hard to tell for certain from the image, the tracking of the touch appears considerably cruder, and in particular to lack the precision required for a small hand-held device, suggesting that it is not using Apple's algorithms, the key feature of which is that they include methods optimized to provide useful tracking of the pad of a finger on a small touch display. It is hard to see how any reasonable jury would consider this to be prior art for Apple's specific multitouch methods.
I guess that would be relevant if Apple's design patent were just for "grid of colorful icons."
But it isn't.
Actually, there have been studies using objective criteria of expertise, such as number of peer-reviewed publications in the field of climate science.
But of course, the true conspiracy theorist will just insist that is because pro-AGW scientists are conspiring to prevent those who disagree from getting published.
I'd like to see a study to test the hypothesis that anybody who puts more than 3 non-acronym words in one paragraph in ALL CAPITALS is likely to believe in one or more conspiracy theories.
Actually, the thimerosal theory of autism was not very plausible even at the outset, because a) the amount of mercury was very small, and b) there have been enough instances of environmental mercury poisoning that the symptoms are well known, and they do not include autism. It was never a serious scientific theory. Thimerosal was removed from most vaccinations simply on the general concern that even though there was no actual evidence of harm, the possibility could not be entirely excluded that it might produce some subtle adverse effect (like the slight reduction in IQ that has been reported even with low doses of lead).
Or in other words, disinterested scientists should not advise us on the impact of global warming and how to ameliorate it--they should leave this job up to the fossil fuel industry and the public relation agencies and politicians who depend upon that industry for financial support.
Many people with Asperger's are perfectly fine. The may not be very good in social situations, but they have intense interests that can be very rewarding and can lead them into good careers. I imagine that a substantial fraction of my classmates at MIT would be diagnosed with Asperger's today. But there are also people with autism who can't speak, who are constantly in emotional turmoil, and who require constant care.
You'd have to have an idea of what to vaccinate against. It's not like anybody has identified an autism virus.
Autism is considered a developmental disorder. But people on the autism spectrum don't necessarily stop developing. In clinical trials, typically something like a third of the patients in the placebo group show significant improvement. Many parents of children with autism are constantly trying one "treatment" or another, and when their child happens to show improvement, they credit whatever they tried last. They tell other parents, and it becomes a fad. And there are always doctors willing to offer the latest fad treatment--at a price.
There is a gastrointestinal peptide called secretin. It regulates bicarbonate secretion in the intestines. Three autistic kids were each given a single injection of secretin (they also had GI problems, which seem to be common in autism, although nobody is completely sure whether it is part of the disorder) and it was widely reported that their autistic behavior improved dramatically. There was a huge secretin fad. Over a thousand kids were treated with secretin. The company that made it couldn't keep up with the demand. Eventually, the controlled studies were done: the secretin group got better; so did the placebo group. No difference. The experimenters couldn't believe it. There were more studies: higher doses, more injections, secretin from different species. I even found one study that put it in an ointment and smeared it on the skin. None of them worked better than placebo. As a result of the secretin fad, we now know a great deal about secretin and autism--and what we know is that it doesn't work.
Fortunately, it seems like secretin is pretty much harmless. But a lot of "autism treatments" are not. There are still kids being treated with chelating agents, based on a long-debunked notion that autism has something to do with mercury poisoning. But chelating agents have serious risk of side effects, and can be dangerous if misused, and their have been some very bad consequences.
Nobody knows yet if this will treat autism in humans. A major problem for developing autism therapy is that there are no validated animal models (although there are quite a few candidates). The problem is, what constitutes autism in an animal? The most troubling symptoms of autism in humans relate to social-emotional behaviors that have no strong correlates in animals. So what we have in terms of "autistic behavior" in animals are things along the lines of "does the 'autistic' mouse sniff the other mouse less than normal?" But it turns out that mouse social behavior is pretty fragile: all sorts of genetic and pharmacological manipulations screw up mouse social behavior, and chances are that they are not all valid models of autism.
Now, an animal model does not have to be exactly like a human to be useful. The key question is, does a manipulation that normalizes the "autistic" animal behavior also improve the core symptoms of autism in humans? This is an area that is very much in its infancy, so nobody really knows.
Part of the problem is that we don't know what is really wrong in autism. There are clear neurochemical differences, but we don't yet know if these are a cause of the behavioral deficits in autism. One possibility is that the damage in autism occurs very early, even before birth. The brain is just miswired, and there is nothing much that can be done about it after symptoms emerge. In this case, an intervention would have to be very early, perhaps even in utero, to work. Another possibility is that the fundamental wiring of the brain is OK (on a gross level, there is no evidence of major damage, although there is evidence for subtle changes in what neurons are where), but that the signaling between neurons is off in some way that can be correctable, in which case there might be some dietary, pharmacological, or gene therapy manipulation that could bring function closer to what we think of as normal.
And of course, there are likely multiple types of autism (probably caused by different mutations), so some forms might be treatable late, while others might not.
And if your collection of CDs or vinyl LPs burns, you can't restore your music either. But sensible people back up their hard drives. Or you can pay Apple for iTunes Match, and Apple will back it up for you. If you don't like Apple, Amazon offers a similar service.
No, and Steve doubtless realized that it was not actually a problem for his customers, either. If Bruce Willis wants to leave his music collection to his daughters, all he actually has to do is copy it onto a hard disk and hand it to them. Apple is not going to go after them, and even if they were unwise enough to brag about it in public, there's not a whole lot that the RIAA could do to them either. This is not a matter of putting songs on Bittorrent, where the music industry's lawyers could argue that they are liable for lost sales if everybody who bittorrented those songs were to buy the album instead. At most, Bruce Willis's estate would be liable for the actual cost of the songs--hardly even worth the trouble and expense of a lawsuit, not to mention the bad publicity. For that matter, if Willis's daughters had chosen to maintain his Apple ID after his death, it's unlikely that Apple would have objected.
Bruce Willis has decided to fight for the right to will his music collection to his kids openly and legally, rather than doing it under the table. This is a principled stand, and it might ultimately lead to a more rational status of electronic property. Good for him! But in practice, it doesn't really affect your ability to pass your music onto your kids after you die--or before, for that matter.
And if one of those companies sued Apple, and produced equally compelling evidence that Apple was actively trying to copy those devices, those companies would likely receive large judgments as well. That's how intellectual property law works.
But it seems pretty unlikely. After all, Samsung and other companies were trying to copy Apple because, even though they had been in the phone market for years, Apple's designs were far more successful. Apple had far less motivation to copy these less successful companies--particularly considering that the nearly universal industry wisdom when Apple released the iPhone was that there was at most a small market for touch phones without keyboards
When other companies have trademarked and patented designs, there is indeed. That's how intellectual property law works.
Yet it was obvious to the jury that Samsung's icons were far more like Apple's than either Apple's or Samsung's icons were like the green telephone buttons on older phones, and documentation was produced demonstrating that Samsung had studied Apple's designs and tried to copy them. Moreover, the jury saw evidence that other companies's did not infringe upon Apple's designs in the same way. So it was not inadvertent overlap of universal industry practice but a deliberate pattern of copying that went far beyond that.
So you are saying that Samsung deliberately planned on losing $1bn?
No, just that Samsung recklessly chose to go beyond the bounds of copying that other manufacturers, including their operating system developer Google thought reasonable. So it's hardly surprising that a jury had the same reaction that Google did.
In the trial, evidence was produced that Samsung actively studied Apple's designs and tried to imitate them, so it's hardly surprising that a jury agreed with Apple that Samsung's designs are not original. And certainly other manufactures have managed to come up with perfectly functional phones that do not infringe upon Apple's design patents (indeed, the jury found that some of of Samsung's devices avoid infringing on some of Apple's design patents). Compatibility among different devices is assured by standards to which Apple and other manufacturers have contributed. But compatibility does not require, for example, that icons be the same shape, use a similar color screen, and be similarly arranged to those on the iPhone. So it is perfectly possible to construct a fully functional smartphone that does not infringe upon Apple's patents.
Since the old Kindle Fire is gone, there is no need for a "2." They'll probably follow Apple's recent strategy; it's just be "The New Kindle Fire."
Sounds like typical Amazon efficiency. They planned the stock of the Kindle Fire to run right up until the introduction of the new model, and hit it pretty close. They don't want to just list the old one as out of stock, because then they would have a backlog of orders that could never be filled, and they'd incur additional expense contacting customers and switching the order to the new one (which might not be exactly the same price).
Actually, he was talking about why they decided that Samsung's "460" patent, which "covers a method of transmitting emails, with and without embedded images, from a mobile phone with a built-in camera" was not invalidated by prior art. And indeed, the jury did find that Apple had not proved that patent invalid
And also that Apple did not infringe upon it.
If you actually watch the video, you'll see that the patent he is talking about is the "460" patent, is a Samsung patent on a method of transmitting emails from a mobile phone with a camera. Indeed, the jury did rule that Apple had not proved that Samsung's patent was invalid. However, they also ruled that Apple did not violate it, so even if the jury had found Samsung's patent invalid based on prior art, it would not have changed anything.
Patch clamping isolated cells is not all that hard. It has become the standard method of single-cell recording, and automated devices to do it have been available for years. This device automatically patch clamps neurons in brain slices, which is trickier because it's harder to see what you are doing.
That seems unlikely. After all, one of the things that came out in the trial was that Google (and other third parties) warned Samsung that their products looked too similar to Apple's. And the dividing line was certainly clear enough that Microsoft has had no difficulty coming up with phones that clearly do not infringe on Apple's design patents. So how is it such a terrible tragedy if Samsung has to come up with original designs, the way Microsoft and other manufacturers have done?
You said, "Seems like they had it right back in 1830 when the patent office was planning on closing it's doors for good, claiming that there was nothing left to invent."
So if nothing worth patenting was invented since 1830, you wouldn't mind doing without them, would you?
And no, it is not necessarily the case that those products would still exist. In many cases, a company is only willing to take the risk and make the investment to bring a product to market because their patent guarantees them a temporary monopoly. Some of those products were invented by individuals who worked as inventors only because they could get paid for their patents. Without patents, technology development would have proceeded more slowly, because rather than patenting and disclosing their inventions, companies would have found it advantageous to keep their discoveries as trade secrets (indeed, this was the problem that patent law was created to solve) rather than sharing them with other companies that might enhance them with additional innovations. Less sharing of information means slower progress of technology.
So why then do we need faith? Why is it not sufficient to have simply a working hypothesis
I suggest that you try going a month without using any product patented subsequent to 1830, then reconsider your comment.