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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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The prior art should not have been allowed either | 305 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
News Pick "Capble of Test"
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 25 2012 @ 07:05 PM EDT
Surely the idea of turning on a heater when the temperature falls is
sufficiently well known that it's application to heat a fuel cell is SO obvious
that it should not even be considered for patentability, regardless of the
source of the heat. Maybe the method of producing the heat from the fuel cell
itself might be patentable.

Surely the matter of weather the engine is going or not is totally immaterial as
there are many places in the US and elsewhere that require a source of power to
keep a vehicles engine/battery heated. Having a built in electrical source
makes it very easy and obvious.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

News Pick "Capble of Test"
Authored by: PolR on Monday, June 25 2012 @ 07:21 PM EDT
I think the point of posting this news pick is that a patent attorney can drop a
"capable of" clause" in a patent claim and a computer programmed
to do this capacity, no matter how programmed, will infringe on this clause.

This is very broad because I don't see where the program is limited to a
specific algorithm.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

News Pick "Capble of Test"
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 25 2012 @ 09:06 PM EDT
IANAL. But how I read this was leading in the direction of saying "as if
it's not programmable". That is, here's a device that does X. Can it do
Y? Sure, if I reprogram it. But, as designed and sold, it's not capable of
that.

If things go the direction the article is hinting, then I think the result is
that we ignore whether something is programmable, and just look at what it
actually does. I think that would be an improvement.

MSS2

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The prior art should not have been allowed either
Authored by: globularity on Tuesday, June 26 2012 @ 06:42 AM EDT
I will use this patent as a prime example of the rubbish the USPTO calls
inventions. I have no experience with fuel cells other than I know they produce
voltage have internal resistance and that they like to be warm. From that in the
time it took to read the news pick I had the idea of heating trace tape (called
a power resistor in the patent) connected the fuel cell output via a generic
temperature controller with a means to drive the setpoint. This is routine in
the process industries, a fuel cell is just another process element. The patent
mentions oil as the heat transfer medium so what, a heat transfer medium is
needed choose one suitable

So routine anybody of normal skill in this art would not even think of patenting
it or would be ashamed to, it takes somebody with no skill in this art or no
shame to patent it.

---
Windows vista, a marriage between operating system and trojan horse.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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