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State Street | 191 comments | Create New Account
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Invalidating claim 1
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, April 02 2013 @ 05:14 PM EDT

The patent was stupid.

Apple needs to get on with their corporate life instead of litigating every,
little, chicken-crud patent. Patents that are both obvious and should have
never been allowed because of prior art.

They're making themselves a pariah with these patent troll cases.

If Apple can can compete, they should compete. If they can't compete, then they
need to resign themselves to moving the headphone jack (again) on their next
iPhone and selling it to their dwindling army of groupies.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

To live by illusion must be interesting
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, April 02 2013 @ 05:35 PM EDT

In my humble, non legal, opinion:

Software is abstract - if you think otherwise, I challange you to point to a single example where software exists in physical form.

Abstract concepts are not patentable subject matter - the Supremes keep having to reiterate this concept.

Logically - that means under current Law software should have been considered non patentable subject matter years ago and software patents should have never been granted.

However, you have Lawyers willing to argue that "this process that looks like math isn't really math". In short: they're willing to argue an absurd position to create an illusion of a patentable invention.

The fact so much energy is going into attempting to argue and sustain such illusions - and the counter energy going into trying to prove the illusion - it seems you've given another great example of the stupidity behind the granting and existence of such patents.

The only party that benefits in this scenario are the Patent Lawyers. They're actually being paid to expend all this useless energy. Not useless to the Patent Lawyers but to everyone else.

Even though I don't think it was your intent:

    You have just proven to me the situation was even stupider then just having a stupid patent granted in the first place!
Bottom line point: just because something took a lot of energy doesn't make it any less stupid.

The existence of the patent is stupid. The bounce-back effect is reasonably interesting eye candy. Nothing more.

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Invalidating claim 1
Authored by: PJ on Tuesday, April 02 2013 @ 05:38 PM EDT
And yet, we did it. Perhaps it is you who need to
reexamine your own biases. You see, if you write
software, you are not impressed by software
that is easy to write. And we had one guy write
a bounce back work-around in 15 minutes.

The problem is that folks who don't write
software think it is magic. It's not. It's
just algorithms moving data around. And
algorithms are mathematics, and you can't
patent math. You can't patent data either.
So we could call this patent improperly issued,
based on more than one logic prong.

The fact that it takes effort to get rid of
stupid patents in no way demonstrates that
they are valuable, or that they are hard to
demonstrate to normal people as improperly
issued. The problem is that there is in the law
a presumption of validity, and that makes even
stupid patents hard to overturn.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

State Street
Authored by: Ian Al on Wednesday, April 03 2013 @ 03:57 AM EDT
I find much of State Street legally and factually in error despite the credentials of the author, Judge Rich. For instance, he distinguishes 'mathematical algorithms' from 'non-mathematical' algorithms and he says that running algorithms on a computer is sufficiently new and useful to warrant a patent because the computer does it faster. He also says that running an algorithm on a pre-existing general purpose computer makes a new machine. All of those conclusions are factually flawed.

However, he opines:
The plain and unambiguous meaning of Section 101 is that any invention falling within one of the four stated categories of statutory subject matter may be patented, provided it meets the other requirements for patentability set forth in Title 35, i.e., those found in Sections 102, 103, and 112, Para.2.
Only claim 1 is an independent claim... A “machine” is proper statutory subject matter under Section 101. We note that, for the purposes of a Section 101 analysis, it is of little relevance whether claim 1 is directed to a “machine” or a “process,” as long as it falls within at least one of the four enumerated categories of patentable subject matter, “machine” and “process” being such categories.
I reversed those comments because, in the original, it begins by appearing to assert that an independent claim can be in more than one class of statutory subject matter. By all means challenge what Judge Rich meant, but I consider the 'plain and unambiguous meaning of Section 101' takes preference.

The Apple patents are a method of displaying the last or first in a series of content pages or methods of allowing a user to manage the display of content.

The patents should monopolise the use by people of the patented method. Instead, machines are accused of infringing on the methods.

From Flook:
Flook rejected “[t]he notion that post-solution activity, no matter how conventional or obvious in itself, can transform an unpatentable principle into a patentable process.
Process is defined for the purposes of the statute to include methods. The Apple methods of indicating content limits and managing the display of content have no post-solution activity. Without that, methods and processes are non-statutory.

If the Apple patents were statutory machine subject matter, which by definition they are not, they would not be machines in their own right. They are only statutory subject matter if they are new and useful improvements of the mobile phone machine. The improved machine inventions do not do anything of themselves that is more useful than the original machine. They just provide different methods of doing what the original machine did. They fail the statutory test of Section 101 for the invention to be useful of itself. As a machine improvement, they are non-statutory.

The functions claimed in the Apple patents only have any relationship to mobile phones because the claim is just tipped into the mix. The claims, of themselves, relate just as well to many processor based machines and non-computer based machines such as a slide projector.

The patents do not give the means of implementing the functions such that one skilled in programming mobile phones or making any other applicable machine can implement them. The patents fail §112 for failing to detail 'the manner and process of making and using it' and 'particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention'.

It doesn't take a geek to apply the law. The only reason that the examiner had problems invalidating the patents was that he restricted the analysis to only part of the statute's provisions.

It takes a geek to know that installing software in a general purpose computing machine does not make a new and improved machine. It allows the machine to carry out new functions. Functions without means are abstract ideas and non-statutory subject matter.

---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Thanks for the contamination, by the way
Authored by: cjk fossman on Wednesday, April 03 2013 @ 06:24 AM EDT
It is inconsiderate to post actual patent language in the
main thread here.

Some of us studiously avoid reading patents, and for good
reason.

So why don't you never do that again? Others here have
found ways to keep patent language out of the main thread
and to warn us when they provide links to actual patent
text.

I'm sure you can figure out how to do this as well.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Excessive breadth of patents on responses of touch-screen devices to gestures
Authored by: macliam on Wednesday, April 03 2013 @ 03:31 PM EDT

I plan to add a child comment stating Claim 19 of the '381 patent. Don't read if you don't read patents. Then I will describe a device that would almost certainly infringe, though, I suggest not implementing bounce back

The PTO operates a peripheral claiming system (see Wikipedia article or the second substantial paragraph of Differential Formalism in claiming Intellectual Property: A Response to Fromer by Henry Smith of the Harvard Law School, in the University of Chicago Law Review.) Under the peripheral claiming system, it is the words of the patent claim (as they would be interpreted by the PHOSITA or Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art) that determines whether or not some device, manufacture or method is infringing or is prior art. Thus the alleged prior art or infringing article is compared against the words of the claim, not against the embodiments of the invention disclosed in the specification.

If the claim is excessively broad, many devices and methods can infringe it that bear little resemblance to the original invention.

And ‘software patents’ (so-called) typically contain broad, abstract claims.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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