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I have been involved with several patent suits (on both litigant side and defendant side) and as an engineer, I have to admit that there has never been a time when I haven't read the statement of the problem the patent says its going to solve, and not thought of the solution myself, way before the patent presents the same solution. In other words, every single litigated software patent I've been asked to review has been BLATANTLY obvious. And I'm no genius. I've talked to other engineers and they've all said the same thing. I just explain a problem domain, and they usually give a solution that comes under the claims of the litigated patent.
I wish this was the bar for a patent -- If it's not intuitively obviously ("BLATANTLY") new and patentable, it's not patentable at all.
If I'm reading this right, Apple had to pay damages because it had
secure p2p video connections </ full stop>.
VirnetX had alleged that two of its patents - registered in 2002 and
2009 - had been infringed by Apple's iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads.
These referred to ways to establishing a secure communication link
between different types of computers using a protocol referred to as
TARP (Tunneled Agile Routing Protocol).
...
"Apple says they don't infringe, but Apple developers testified that
they didn't pay any attention to anyone's patents when developing their
system," a lawyer for VirnetX was quoted as saying by the Bloomberg news
agency.
The VirnetX patents cover the use of a domain-name service to set up
virtual private networks, through which a website owner can interact
with customers in a secure way or an employee can work at home and get
access to a company's electronic files.
Look, if you can invent the same thing without having any idea the other
existed, I'd say you haven't [in any society run by common sense] run
afoul of a patent. And unless this predated Gnutella (it doesn't, I
don't believe), you've got prior art, right?
Apparently some of the decision was
"vacated", but I think we can
agree the patent system isn't optimal. I hate that I can't even
understand the argument after reading two articles. When the crux of the
issue is this obfuscated, you're just playing what Gygax called (iirc)
"semantic gymnastics" at this point.
Patents in software drive me crazy. Too much is painfully obvious. I
understanding protecting something limited and genuinely new, but this
is insane.
Cartman is introduced to the Family Guy writing staff, who turn out
to be a group of manatees. The staff, who live in a large tank, pick up
"idea balls" from a large pile of them, each of which has a different
noun, a verb or a pop culture reference written on it, and deliver them,
five at a time, to a machine that then forms a Family Guy cutaway gag
based on those ideas.
Many of the patents might not hold up in court, but it can easily cost $1 million to mount a defense. For a company whose business model is filing lawsuits, the only incremental cost of each new case is the filing fee - about $500.
With decks stacked like that, most organizations simply surrender, often settling for tens of thousand of dollars.
"It's a shakedown, it's extortion, but it's legal," said Julie Samuels, an attorney who is the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's easy to be a troll, it's cheap to be a troll, and it's totally unethical. It's exploiting a loophole in a broken system."
Nothing stifles creative garage-built enterprises like the amorphous yet ever-present threat of nuclear patent trolls. If it's this easy to reinvent your patent in a cleanroom, you don't deserve protection.
The cost to Samsung would, however, not be limited to whatever the court determines it has to pay Apple on a per-unit basis. There would also be the cost of having to maintain two different code trees (one for the U.S. and one for countries in which Apple has won or may win injunctions) for different jurisdictions.
The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they've actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They're not sending bombs at each other.
I think both Tim [Cook, Apple's CEO] and Larry [Page, Google's CEO], the sort of successors to Steve [Jobs] and me if you will, have an understanding of this state model.
This metaphor scares me a little, though obviously it's already the world we live in. The real empires use legacy empires as foundation. On one hand, I'm happy to have patent squabbles out of the courts, but I'm upset with the implicit connotation that corporations should essentially be making law.
For me, I think the bottom line is that [the current system of] patents let copyright overreach its useful bounds.
Macrumors paraphrases more of the interview thusly [sic]: "He also noted that the litigation would continue for "a while" and that the big loser is not Apple or Google, but a smaller company trying to get an operating system off the ground as they wouldn't have the necessary patent coverage."
Is that accurate? What does Linux do for mobile devices? I'm completely in the dark here. Is Linux allowed to use patents because nobody sued early enough to protect them? Or does Linux not violate patents? Is "everything" in Linux (pick a distro) based on "prior art"? Certainly Red Hat has pockets deep enough to sue, right? If Fedora (or whatever Linux they're running) tripped up on patents, you'd think they'd would be sued -- or that the non-pursuit means the protection of those patents (though here I notice I'm stupidly conflating (c) with patents) is void?
That is, if I put DistroX on a hand-held device, how could that violate a patent any more than DistroX on a mobile device?
I wish the FSF would release MobileHurd and have pockets deep enough to protect against suits -- sort of a detente invoked by the fear of mutually assured annihilation. But then I'd be using state-based metaphors.
So if Microsoft ever sued Linux distributor Red Hat for patent infringement, for instance, OIN might sue Microsoft in retaliation, trying to enjoin distribution of Windows. It's a cold war, and what keeps the peace is the threat of mutually assured destruction: patent Armageddon - an unending series of suits and countersuits that would hobble the industry and its customers
"It's a tinderbox," Moglen says. "As the commercial confrontation between [free software] and software-that's-a-product becomes more fierce, patent law's going to be the terrain on which a big piece of the war's going to be fought. Waterloo is here somewhere."
I believe that FRAND issues are even less amenable to jury trials than the technical issues relating to patent infringement and validity.
That's interesting -- have we (rhetorical; the answer is almost certainly yes) gotten to the point that we need specialists to hear specific types of cases? So far, I think the quote above just suggests that we need really smart folks to hear these cases, and judges are, on average, very smart. But do we need technology and patent specialist judges? Pre-vetted specialist jury pools?
A very large part of me screams both are anti-American -- as in against the intent of the Constitution, which suggests in turn that the cases are what's wrong. If there's a problem without a solution, it's the problem that's bogus. If Joe and Jane Schmoe on the street can't understand what constitutes justice, should it really fall under the purview of our public courts? Would it really be so bad to either 1.) Have these guys sign some collective agreement that falls under a separate system of arbitration? 2.) Throw the whole patent mess out? So Samsung can make its own iPhone under 2.). Do we really care? (And I say that as an Apple stockholder.)
There is a growingly apparent disconnect between our courts and their subject matter.
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