The next of claims seemed to begin to regurgitate the previous ones with some indiscerbable minute difference.
None of this sounds novel. I read another of their patents where they invented a directory backed DNS service and web browser connections. This company sounds like one massive troll.
The sub-claims are just covering minor variations of the implementation, and can safely be ignored in general in any patent.
While the idea of a vibrator is not new, and the idea of powering devices via USB isn't new either, the combination of these two non-new ideas was new.
The patent was granted, and when someone (not the patent holder) produced a USB-powered vibrator, they were found in a violation of the patent in question.
Similarly, if someone made a patent about "building a DNS system for data", and someone else used that idea to actually build that system, they may be in a violation of the patent. The more claims (or sub-claims) there are, the more specific the innovation was, and now the question is whether the supposed infringement was actually implementing all of the claims of the patent.
Many patents are granted by the patent office then revoked by judges.
Yes, it is even more complicated than that; I'm just trying to toss out a joke while also pointing out the system is even worse than implied.
If you paid the filing dues (a significant sum), and nobody has patented that before, then yes.
> nobody could build a car charged via USB?
Anybody could build a car powered by USB, and you could then sue them for the infringement of your patent. It could then go in many directions, from you becoming very rich, to your patent being invalidated and you found responsible for court fees.
This system is not as ridiculous as it sounds.
It's so not ridiculous that Amazon was able to prevent the entire ecommerce industry from implementing anything even close to a "one click purchase" flow because of a patent. Not because you couldn't see Amazon's source code for the feature, or couldn't come up with your own completely different implementation of the idea, but because as long as you can convince a completely unsophisticated and inexpert jury members that a paragraph of extremely vague text can be read in any way to apply to anyone else's system, you are violating their patent.
Imagine being able to patent addition, or the very concept of a cake, such that nobody could make a product that was bready and/or sweet without paying you a protection fee.
Remember that the US patent office had to expressly ban any patent for "perpetual motion machine", not because it is literally impossible by physical reality, but because they kept granting patents for physically impossible perpetual motion machines
The patent system is the problem. None of this should have been granted but when you really try to define what software patents are novel it becomes incredibly difficult.
Just because you think this is trivial does not mean a layperson does.
Is an encryption algo novel? What's novel about it, it's just a hashing function with some new parameters.
The reality is, software patents are a joke and should be dropped entirely. Copyright is enough protection for most use cases.
Aka, don't hate the player, hate the game. And ideally, do something to fix it instead of complaining about "trolls" as if that'll ever fix the issue.
Your comment seems to relate more to unfairness in [lack of] awards of costs in USA legal proceedings.
If you sue me for something I didn't do then it shouldn't cost me anything; that seems reasonable whether the domain is IPR or any other aspect of life.
The same patent holders are the biggest backers of our politicians and will absolutely never allow any reasonable fix to the system itself.
All I read is how we should vote and yell at our representatives, completely ignoring the fact they were only elected because of donations from those benefiting from this system in the first place.
None of these sounds novel now.
It was much more back in 2000.
If this covered separate store networks, then maybe that’s somewhat unique, but that’s not a far leap for me.
Still, even if the patents were in some way novel at their time, I think the details are far more important, especially: how close is AWS' implementation to the exact algorithm they describe? How many others came to the exact same implementation not knowing about this patent, potentially proving that it didn't actually meet the bar for novelty at the time it was granted?
Still, patents become public from the moment they are filed. So you can scour the patent applications database as well if you fear others have already filed for a patent for something you are trying to do. Of course, that will mean that, if you go ahead with your own implementation and the patent is later granted, you will not be able to claim that you didn't know about this, and will face higher damages if you end up in a lawsuit.
The principle here is that a company decides to publish some internal discovery instead of keeping it for themselves, and the government in return grants them a limited time monopoly on that invention. The company could instead keep the invention a secret, but in that case, they can't stop others from using it, and if someone else patents it, their secret invention can actually infringe on the patent granted to someone else later.
No. There is an 18 month delay to publication: https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1120.html
How do you do that? beyond my pay grade.
If you want more definitive timestamping, there are services that will do that, like OpenTimestamps, an actually a decent use case for blockchain.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustre_(file_system)
Also, depending on the feature set listed in the patent, GPFS (which I remember using around 2000) was definitely around earlier than 2000. It was/is a clustered file system from IBM that had distributed storage nodes. Not sure how it did metadata though, which might not make it relevant to the patent, but the same ideas were definitely at work here.
(And it being IBM, you can be sure those were patented too)
Even if there was nothing closer to this than DNS I don't think this patent should be valid.
However, the "it's not obvious" part is very important. Not working in the field, it's not at all clear to me if using DNS for data was an obvious idea in ~2000 for building a distributed DB or not.
This sounds to me like the web. You make a connection, you request a resource, it returns content and references to further resources that are required to get the full content of the resource you originally requested.
That wouldn't matter if AWS came to the very similar implementation on their own, after the Plaintiff's patent was issued (and became public information). Patent, unlike copyright, does not allow for independent invention/creation. If you come to, on your own, something already covered in a patent during its term, then you infringe.
I have no idea if there was prior art or how close the procedure they describe was to known storage algorithms in 2000 when the application was made, so I'm not saying this is a valid patent, but it doesn't seem like a completely frivolous patent to me at first glance.
Of course, if indeed AWS came to a very similar implementation themselves, as the jury found, then that further suggests that the idea is not that novel.