It’s not patenting facial recognition. It’s patenting the specific use case of identifying a subset of images to transfer over the wireless link based on the subject of the image.

Sorry, it seems I forgot to put the word "like" in there, as in similar to.

I understand it's not patenting facial recognition in general, just in the specific case of using facial rec or other techniques (which the lawyers called transfer criteria/subject identification) to identify subjects of images before filtering by subject and transferring them wirelessly.

I stand by the meaning of the simile though. There's nothing original enough to be patentable in that claim.

A specific method for doing facial recognition should be patentable. "Use facial rec to identify individuals in images, then filter for specific individuals, then transfer those images" should not. If we allow patents on use cases, every use case will be patented and eventually the trolls will have a collection of patents that together cover the very idea of recognizing faces.

Like parent said, the patent doesn't actually seem have anything to do with facial recognition. I read it as talking about images that have already been identified, by some unspecified process. The process could be facial recognition, but it could also just be the user herself manually identifying each image.

I do agree that the patent is too unclear and broad, and that everything described must have been already known by 2008.

I'm not fluent in patent lawyer, so I must say you might be right. I read "subject identification" as an active process that was part of the claim, but it could refer to a pregenerated tag instead.

Which would make the patent even more laughable. "Wirelessly transfer all images I've tagged with 'Vacation 2017'" is patentable?

Still sounds awfully general. I mean, it is clearly subjective, but I think the issue is the divide between domain specific technical expertise and lawyers / judges who would argue a patent is exploitable.