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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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simple = obvious | 191 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Invalidating claim 1
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, April 02 2013 @ 09:55 PM EDT
The problem is that bounce-back, as a concept , was described in the
literature years before the iPhone was released.

All Apple came up with, was a mathematical algorithm which the USPTO
was dumb enough to patent, even though issuing said patent was a
violation of US Constitutional Law, US Statute Law, US Case Law, and USPTO
Rules and Regulations.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Invalidating claim 1
Authored by: PJ on Tuesday, April 02 2013 @ 11:49 PM EDT
Obviousness invalidates patents too. So if
it's trivial, it isn't supposed to get a patent.

As for the rest of your comment,
perhaps you have forgottn that Mark Webbink,
my co-editor on Groklaw, teaches law and
was chosen to run the Peer to Patent project.

But understanding the tech is what matters when
it comes to finding prior art, which is why
Groklaw members have found prior art for real cases,
and it has helped win some cases too, so you
can't hold your view and include those factual
events at the same time. In short, you are
wrong.

If the guys here say there is prior art, they know
and they can point to it. They have. And on that
basis, it is absolutely true, and proven in real
life, that if the guys here say a patent has prior
art that anticipated it, it would be wise to take
it into consideration.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Business people? ROFL
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 03 2013 @ 12:46 AM EDT

Ok... so I as a developer can be considered an expert in the field of software.

A Patent Attorney can be considered an expert in the field of Patent Law.

I suggest that only patent lawyers, patent examiners, patent judges, business people, legal scholars and Supreme Court judges, are likely to understand current patent law, because that law is complex and counter-intuitive.
Bolding mine. That's a laugh. Business people - those neither expert in Patent Law nor Software - are, in your humble opinion, more apt to understand what goes on in patent law as applied to software then those of us who are the experts in at least one of the two fields of overlapping issues.

Given your opinions.... I take it you are in one of the groups you've identified as being qualified to understand current patent law. Perhaps it's time you clarified what your role relative to patents are.

After all - if you claim we don't know what we're talking about because we're unqualified - then it's only fair you present your credentials.

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

simple = obvious
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 03 2013 @ 12:58 AM EDT
If something is simple, then one skilled in the art can produce it, and as such,
no patent should issue. Or in other words, if its simple it's obvious and no
patent should issue.

Take TV, at 60 frames per second. Increase the rate to 120 fps and use LCD
shutter glasses synced to the TV (or polarized screen and glasses) to allow a
two eyed humans to see seperate images for each eye thus seeing a film in 3D at
60 fps. Hardly a ground braking idea for sterioscopic TV yet i'm sure somone has
patents on this 'idea'. Well, taking it further, it is not a leap in any way for
an ordinary person, let alone someone skilled in teh art to postulate sending
two separate 2D pictures to 2 different users, yet a patent on this obvious
innovation was issued to (i think) Sony for a gaming system. Heck, increase the
frame rate to 180 fps for three gamers or 240 fps for four gamers, etc. Really,
do these deserve a patent for this non novel idea building on other non novel
ideas? It's not like the propose some new display tech that allows very high
frame rates to be shown, they only postulate sending different pictures to
different viewers using existing tech and oddly this seemed worthy of a patent.


For me, and IANAL, what seems to be wrong with the patent system is that some
basic thresholds have been ignored in that prior art, obviousness and issues of
one skilled in the art carry far too little if any weight in rejecting an
application, thus far too many silly patents issue.

Really, it should be hard to get a patent, and one should demonstrate the
novelness of their idea, not just to spend $ on lawyers filing an application.

It's all a mess and it is allowing stagnant multinationals to kill off grass
roots innovation which is a very bad thing for us all.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Um, excuse me?
Authored by: OpenSourceFTW on Wednesday, April 03 2013 @ 02:06 AM EDT
As a developer, I find your comments offensive.

So basically, we as developers are not supposed to understand the stuff that we
write? The inventors are irrelevant? So does that mean patents are just to pad
the wallets of large corporations and patent attorneys? All the better to get
rid of them then.

Show me one software patent that shows me (as one skilled in the art) how to
implement it, and I'll let you keep it.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Invalidating claim 1
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 03 2013 @ 05:22 AM EDT
" I suggest that only patent lawyers, patent examiners,
patent judges, business people, legal scholars and Supreme
Court judges, are likely to understand current patent law,
because that law is complex and counter-intuitive."

That the law is counter-intuitive is a good indication that
it is bad law.


[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Answering the question - what is different about claims to response to gestures
Authored by: macliam on Saturday, April 06 2013 @ 03:50 PM EDT

Now that I look at the parent post, I certainly regret writing it. Coming across it again, I felt as though I had been slapped in the face, and had to look away quickly, and couldn't face the thought of re-reading it in detail. It struck me as making its point very aggressively and dogmatically, and not making a point that I would want to be associated with. I was shocked to see what was there, my instant reaction was to ask myself Did I really write that! and look away immediately. If I could re-edit it and tone it down, I would. Or if I could delete it—but unfortunately it will remain on record.

Thinking over the point, I thought I had made, in the space of day away from the Web, I wondered how I would answer it. First the thoughts at the back my mind.

In traditional industries involving the manufacture of (say) CAT-scanners, kettles and steam iron, manufacturers get patents on seemingly-trivial improvements to such devices. What makes patents to equally-trivial-seeming improvements to cellphones and the like different. Because if the law applied to cellphone ‘improvements’ etc. is not to mirror the law as applied to improvements to traditional manufactures, the must be some rational basis for the distinction.

I thought of at least two distinctions: APIs and the potential applicability of the Printed Matter Doctrine.

Briefly, behind the touch screen, there would be an API that would provide functionality to detecting gestures, and for determining what is displayed on the screen. The implementation of the API is protected by Copyright Law, possibly supplemented by Trade Secrets if the implementation is Open Source. The API should not be protected by Copyright - that is what Judge Alsup has ruled on, and, for present purposes, one can assume that APIs are not protected under Copyright Law. And modern APIs are presumably designed by standards committees, or other groups of engineers, and do not represent the results of an inventive act by a single ‘inventor’. If one has an API that can recognize a wide repertoire of gestures, and that can implement a wide variety of functions, many of which will modify the display of the display, there is no public interest in granting patents that associate particular actions with particular gestures.

The other thought was that the Printed Matter Doctrine should surely have relevance in the 21st century to visual displays. Printing changes the chemical composition of a surface of paper, yet the resultant changes may not be accorded patentable weight. The particular configurations of electrical signals or whatever that from the physical cause of the distinctive properties of the image displayed would surely have even less significance, and thus the text, images and patterns displayed on a visual display ought not to be given “patentable weight”. A lawyer can give an opinion how far such an argument would go: I am not a lawyer.

But, in summary, these are surely two factors that would have no relevance with regard to patents of improvements to kettles or steam irons, and that might form a reasoned basis for distinguishing improvements to computer-implemented displays and the like.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

P.S., 'skilled artisan' used in patent law for skilled technologists. Not pejorative.-n/t
Authored by: macliam on Sunday, April 07 2013 @ 04:47 AM EDT
.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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