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A comment on 24 Claims of Lodsys '565 Patent Rejected. Parent comment

Re:24 Claims of Lodsys '565 Patent Rejected by pyre on Monday October 17, 2011 @04:22PM (#3122280)
Semantics. Are you decrementing the counter by a positive number, or incrementing it by a negative number?
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Re:24 Claims of Lodsys '565 Patent Rejected by xenophanes on Monday October 17, 2011 @04:32PM (#3122319)
Yeah that's the point. Sometimes semantics distinctions matter to the law. So can you just decrement by a negative number to get around it, legally?
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Re:24 Claims of Lodsys '565 Patent Rejected by nobody314159 on Monday October 17, 2011 @04:45PM (#3122377)
Semantics especially matter in patents. There is a famous historical case where a patent specified a horizontal beam - since you can never have a perfect horizontal beam in a real machine everyone was free to break it.

It's why every second word in a patent is "substantially"

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Re:24 Claims of Lodsys '565 Patent Rejected by binarymax on Monday October 17, 2011 @04:33PM (#3122320)
I would interpret the 'increment' in the claim to mean increase (by a positive amount). The proposed workaround would start at the end and decrease the counter.
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