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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, July 10 2013 @ 02:46 PM EDT |
And how do an obfuscated explanation help to clarify anything.
The point is not what a thing was planned to achieve, but what it in deed
achieved.
You speak as a lawyers like in a mirror darkly.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: NigelWhitley on Wednesday, July 10 2013 @ 03:31 PM EDT |
I'm a little surprised that you decline to provide any supporting evidence which
would demonstrate how you can be so certain. By contrast, I provided the
evidence from Apple's own document which demonstrated why I interpreted it as I
do. Depressingly, I see you've adopted the "Alice in Wonderland"
defence I mentioned in my original response. Even more depressingly, you seem
determined to merely repeat Apple's position rather than advance any
corroborating information.
In particular, I wonder why you state my interpretation is incorrect and then
fail to rebut anything I said in the section you quote. You do not dispute that
the USPTO and Apple agree the Lira patent includes snap-back functionality (for
which I provided a supporting quotation) nor that the distinction is what the
code is attempting to achieve rather than what the effect is. Indeed, you note
that the difference is that "the claim includes instructions for doing
something other than is called for by any instructions discussed in Lira".
It's worth pointing out that the claim does so without referring to Lira, so it
could equally be stated that claim 19 describes steps to produce the same effect
as Lira but it does not use the same language.
On its face (IMHO,IANAL), claim 19 is pre-empted by Lira and only survived
because Apple argued that the USPTO had interpreted the claim too broadly and
should not include the similar (prior) claim in Lira. To be charitable, Apple
asked the USPTO to view the scope of the claim more narrowly than it had
previously understood it to be. It did not, at any stage, make that same request
of the court (which you also do not dispute) although we have no reason to
suppose that it would have viewed the scope so narrowly.
The key (IMHO,IANAL) is not whether claim 19 could be interpreted in the way
Apple now states but whether the jury could reasonably have been expected to
have interpreted it in that manner or whether they may have erroneously viewed
the scope more broadly and ruled accordingly (as did the USPTO, who rejected the
claim on the basis of the very similarity you describe as immaterial).
In the context of a patent claim, is the effect i.e. what the patented invention
actually does, really "immaterial"? I quoted from the adjudication of
the USPTO which stated that Lira had the "same effect" with relation
to "placing the edges of the column at the edges of the equally sized
display". The USPTO describes the similarity of the effect as
"important to point outs (sic)" which seems (IMHO,IANAL) to indicate
the visual similarity is material to their investigation. More importantly,
Apple's "clarification" of the claim is not one which was obvious to
the USPTO and not one which they had previously offered. In light of that it
does not seem improbable (IMHO,IANAL) that such a limitation would also have
been missed by a jury less familiar with patents than the USPTO.
Bearing in mind the importance of claim construction in patent infringement
cases (IMHO,IANAL), I find it interesting that Apple offered no evidence which
highlighted this critical distinction i.e. no evidence that the stopping
condition in the code matched that required for their claim to be distinguished
from the prior art in Lira. In the absence of such evidence, nor even an
assertion that the code does meet that requirement, how would a jury be expected
to understand that it was an essential element they needed to consider and
assess the evidence accordingly? Or is is it your belief that they did not need
to consider it?
One justification for your apparent certainty would be if you have legal
training, particularly if it is in the field of patents. I make it clear that I
have none but it may be helpful if you would confirm whether your views are
those of a layman, such as myself, or have their grounding in a firm legal
background (although I wouldn't expect anyone to consider them legal advice
unless you state otherwise).
I find your insistence on simply adopting Apple's position to the exclusion of
all other opinions and evidence, and with little of your own to support it,
somewhat troubling. In a friendly way, I'm not sure whether you are missing the
point on purpose or whether it is merely incidental to some other goal but
hopefully your response will put a little more flesh on the bones of your
assertions.
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Nigel Whitley[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: PJ on Wednesday, July 10 2013 @ 04:16 PM EDT |
Then their understanding of their own claim
has changed, in that this isn't what they
said at trial their claim was about.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: tknarr on Wednesday, July 10 2013 @ 04:28 PM EDT |
Thing is, to a programmer it doesn't matter. You have a target point (in the
axis of movement) on the object you're displaying. You have a reference point
(in the axis of movement) on the display. You want to align the reference point
with the target point. The algorithm to do this is the same for all cases. The
Lira patent and Apple's claims are just special cases of target and reference
point selection (centerlines vs. edges), and anything that teaches the general
case teaches those special cases in the process. In fact anything that teaches
either special case teaches the general case, since as a developer that's the
very first thing I'd think of when presented with the problem (if I need to stop
at an edge I'll need to stop at two, and it's easier to develop a routine that
works for both rather than having to handle 4 different special cases (left,
right, up, down)). [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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