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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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Interesting question re:foreign patents. | 201 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Interesting question re:foreign patents.
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 14 2012 @ 04:38 PM EDT
I don't know what agreements North America has in the way of trade but we don't
actually honor patents from anywhere else. Do we? If we don't then prior art has
no meaning here. Come to think of it, not really necessary to have a patent if
it can be proved that the idea was stolen? Tough to do. Ask the Harvard twins.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Prior Art not so important for design patents
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 14 2012 @ 05:19 PM EDT
Think of these things as like trademarks. It isn't about invention. There is no
originality requirement. It is about market distinctiveness.

If the court grants Apple the complete monopoly on smartphones and tablets that
it is seeking then I guess people actually will associate smartphones and
tablets with Apple because - duh - they will be the only ones allowed to sell
them. But surely this is taking what should be an argument about branding and
trademarks to an utterly ridiculous place.

Hoover was first to market with the vacuum cleaner. At first people would have
associated hoover very closely with vacuum cleaners to the extent that someone
seeing a vacuum cleaner might indeed immediately assume it was a hoover. So does
this confusion mean that hoover would be legally entitled to claim ownership of
the vacuum cleaner market ... forever? (Design patents don't expire). That
argument is clearly ridiculous, but it is essentially the exact argument Apple
is trying to make here.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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