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No, the court got it right | 661 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
"big problem remains issuing patents that are obvious"
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 09:43 AM EDT

I'd say the big problem is:

    issuing patents on abstract concepts
Of course, that would eliminate any software/business patents if they fixed that.

I'm unexposed to how many obvious patents are being granted in non-abstract fields. As a result, I don't know how big of a problem that would be compared with issuing patents on abstract concepts.

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

But then...
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 10:10 AM EDT

Neither of the issues identified - nor the several not yet identified - would likely exist if there weren't Patent Lawyers willing to play obfuscation word games in order to patent that which they know is not patentable subject matter.

Since they are held to no responsibility - there's nothing to stop that behavior from continuing.

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

No, the court got it right
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 10:10 AM EDT
If there were diagrams and words tying the patent to hardware implementations then your point would stand, and it wouldn't reach to the software anyway.

But by overreaching and claiming the process, the plaintiff loses everything. This is as it should be.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • Further - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 12:15 PM EDT
    • Further - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 01:19 PM EDT
      • Further - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 11:11 AM EDT
Rackspace/Red Hat Hand Uniloc A Quick And Significant Defeat ~mw
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 10:11 AM EDT
The patent may fail for technical legal reasons but what is actually described is in fact detail on the design of hardware to perform floating point operations efficently. The fact this is not understood shows the inability of those deciding these sort of things to understand the language and context of the subject matter.
I think you underestimate the court here.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Look to the claim!
Authored by: macliam on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 02:44 PM EDT

Uniloc can have all the hardware details they like, but if they are not recited in the claim, they are irrelevant. All that matters is whether Rackspace/Red Hat are infringing the claim that Uniloc assert. If Uniloc had technology that displayed genuine ingenuity and invention, and had claimed that technology in a hardware claim, they could have asserted that claim against Rackspace/Red Hat. But they didn't. And the fact that they only assert Claim 1 suggests that they did not have anything more significant and innovative to assert.

And to construe the claim, it is necessary to look to the language of the claim. What hardware is recited? It is a claim to a method of processing floating point numbers that involves steps of converting, rounding, performing and arithmetic computation and converting. It does not even recite storing the value in a ‘floating-point number memory register’ or ‘floating-point register’; the claim only recites manipulating representations of how the number would be stored in such registers. Such representations could be made, and the steps of the processing fully carried out, with pencil and paper.

Uniloc recognize that the process described in the asserted claim can be carried out with pencil and paper. Which is why they devote section VI of the Plaintiff's surreply (the last of the motions before the Memorandum Opinion and Order) to an argument that District Courts have affirmed that Processes that can be carried out inside a person's head are patentable.

So all the stuff about the hardware is irrelevant. If some aspect of Rackspace/Red Hat's business infringed on a hardware claim, then Uniloc would no doubt have asserted it. Instead they asserted a very broad claim to a principle.

On reading the Uniloc reply, when they dismissed the idea that the process was a mathematical algorithm because of the failure to specify the arithmetical computation involved, I was planning to post a comment to the effect that a mathematical algorithm (as defined in Benson) was unpatentable, not because it was an “abstract intellectual concept”, and thus unpatentable as being an abstract idea. Failure to specify the arithmetical computation only made the claim even more abstract.

The great thing about the abstract idea exception is that anything more abstract and general than an abstract idea must itself be an abstract idea!

Or to put the point another way, if you have a claim that would read on a claim drawn to law of nature, natural phenomenon or abstract idea, or an obvious routine application thereof (that is unpatentable under the doctrine enunciated by the Supreme Court in Mayo), then the broader claim must also be unpatentable. It would defy logic if the broader claim were patent-eligible in a situation where the narrower claim was not.

I can't help thinking that Le Roy v. Tatham, with its dictum that principles are not patentable, is to the point here.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

But it produces a poorer quality result...
Authored by: mtew on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 10:03 PM EDT
...as pointed out elsewhere.

The IEEE floating point standard is specifically designed so
that in at least one mode it retains the best possible
accuracy and in a predictable fashion that allows better
accuracy with some additional calculation. The method in
the patent throws all those properties away at the expense
of three extra computational steps. Talk about a lose-lose
proposition!

Now, an even more important question is how the plaintiff
intended to show that Rackspace, and not just some
Rackspace client, infringed?

---
MTEW

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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