If software patent timeout was geared towards progress instead of hindrance, it would follow the inverse of the path that copyright has taken: shortening the enforcable term instead of lengthening it.
Any suggestions on how to do that with a product as opposed to a service?
They do work, though I wonder whether it is worth the cost. I can't recall exactly, but I think it cost in the region of $10,000/yr. There's also a baby version for significantly cheaper that indexes less docs.
If an idea is so fucking-obvious in hindsight that you don't need the patent's description to re-implement it, than that shouldn't be patentable.
Yeah, Apple did a great job designing the UI ... but sooner or later somebody else would've done it anyway.
10 years ago I owned an HP iPaq ... with a big screen, a stylus, wifi, sound input/output and no physical keyboard. Sooner or later somebody would've thought to add GSM capabilities to it and replace that stylus with fingers.
Apple did it first, and they have a great sense for aesthetics ... but this whole suing stuff is ridiculous. I was kind of feeling sorry for them when Nokia sued (and I'm pretty sure Nokia has patents more enforceable than Apple does).
Nope, Several other manufacturers did this somewhere in 2003. QTEK/HTC had a few of them early on, HP introduced the iPaq H6300 (I could get one in europe early 2004)... Apple came with the first iPhone in 2007 (that's three years later).
Of course you could argue that they understood the problem better than (most) other manufacturers (I'm pretty sure they do) but Apple being 'first' is definately not true.
Bullshit.
If an idea is so fucking-obvious in hindsight that you don't need the patent's description to re-implement it, than that shouldn't be patentable.
That's painting with an absurdly broad brush and probably covers thousands of things that you might otherwise regard as patent-worthy.
I have an ice cream scoop with two hinged handles like a pair of scissors with two halves of a scoop for 'blades'. When you squeeze the handles together, the scoop scissors together so you can scoop, and when you let them apart, the scoop opens, loosening the ice cream. Works great.
"Duh!", right? http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6474974
Oops, I guess the guy that thought that one up shouldn't have a right to profit from the value he's added to my ice-cream scooping experience, seeing as how it's so obvious in retrospect. I guess we should all have an equal right to make our own copies of that scoop--which we hadn't thought of but surely we would have all thought of eventually seeing as how it's so obvious now. If he had wanted to profit from his invention he should have made it more complicated.
Or, maybe obviousness-after-the-fact is not a good way of judging patentability.
Yeah, Apple did a great job designing the UI ... but sooner or later somebody else would've done it anyway.
Can you relate that to the things patents that Apple has actually claimed to be infringed?
Inversely, there were inventions (Microsoft Surface, Jeff Han's touchscreen) previous to iPhone that had multi-touch capability and exploited much of the same ideas. They just weren't phones. The obviousness is that creating a smaller form factor and putting some phone capabilities in it were no-brainers for this tech _eventually_ since the technology did exist.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_tou...
I don't understand what you're saying.
Microsoft Surface, Jeff Han's touchscreen
Both of these use completely different technology that does not scale down to phone sizes--they're notable because they scale up so well and can sense effectively any number of points, and can sense objects, not because multi-touch was new. FingerWorks, for instance, predates both, and a dozen things predate FingerWorks. See: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
There is no one single technology called "multi-touch" and nobody with any sense is claiming that Apple has a patent on the concept as a whole. While they do hold patents on their touch technology (via FingerWorks), those aren't the patents Apple is suing HTC over. The whole angle is a red herring.
I think you're correct. Now the cards are on the table - I have a feeling if they were to withdraw this, it would hurt the countersuit against Nokia - who could then point at Apple's selective/questionable enforcement.
> "Neglecting stick licensing [enforcement] has two problems. First, it results in a loss of potential royalty and damages revenues from infringed patents. Second, it undermines carrot licensing of both infringed and noninfringed patents. If an industry perceives a lax attitude on the part of a university in enforcing its patents, it will think it can infringe with impunity. Under these circumstances, taking a license would be tantamount to making a charitable gift, which few in this economic climate are inclined to do." -- Alexander Poltorak of General Patent Corporation in http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Thars+gold+in+Tham+thar+patent...
And yet Google is potentially pulling out of China due to having its IP stolen.
Regardless, anything on the nation-state level is not worth debating about because other nations are not obligated to respect US patent, trade-secret, copyright, or any other law. It doesn't matter whether a US company patents its stuff or keeps it a secret, companies in China will do what they want.
"Good artists copy. Great artists steal." said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.
You know this whole business of patents, and IP as a whole, is fundamentally flawed in that there is no objective way to decide what is influence and what is blatant copying/theft. The Justice route simply doesn't work. And because patents are public documents, you are basically inviting competitors to modify your inventions.
I can think of two better ways to protect your IP. One is to do what Google does and keep the knowledge of your best stuff to yourself. Up to now nobody can crack their search black box. And two, keep innovating. If you do those 2 things in conjunction, I doubt you'd have to worry about people "stealing" your IP.
I believe that it’s good business, in the long run, for a company’s acts of aggression to take place in the market, not in the courts. My concern regarding this litigation against HTC is that it looks like an act of competitive aggression, not defense.
I completely agree. The sad part is it maybe too late for them to reverse course.