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Someone has money to waste and free time on their hands.

How is it that ALL of the web developers for those companies willingly used a "patented" code or whatever. Come on now, that is a bit ridiculous.
 
If one guy on one end of the world thinks of the wheel, but another guy on the other end of the world actually creates the wheel, should the first guy get credit?

The guy that actually makes the wheel gets to make money selling them to cart makers. He does well for 5 to 10 years.

Out of the blue, the other guy that tough of the idea calls the guy that makes the wheels and scares him into paying him royalties for every wheel the guy has made and 2 years worth of wheels to be made. The guy that makes the wheels raises the price of the wheels and everyone except the cart manufactorer and its customers are happy.

Sounds about the same.
 
All "software patents" should be made invalid. The only software patents i have ever seen have been from lazy gits who sit on some totally vague description and wait for another person or company (with money) to trip over it.

Yes, I agree, but where to stop? In the past you could patent actual inventions, now you can patent ideas and concepts. As we are dealing more and more with information and less with objects this is expected. There is no more a clear line separating the two; hence, all the contentious around patents infringement, copyrights, non-disclosure agreements, non-competitive clause in contracts, usb ids, piracy, etc.

Everybody is in the same boat, Apple included. Just look at Apple's patents published in MacRumors in the last few months.
 
Pretty much .....

The problem is, "patent law" has become kind of a game for the rich. It's like gambling at Vegas... You patent as many concepts as possible and wait for someone to stumble onto using one of them. Then you strike with a legal team and see if you win or lose some money on it.

The original purpose of the legal protection is completely bastardized. I think most of this could be eliminated by simply disallowing a patent on anything that isn't put into active use as a product or service by the person or business filing the request.

The way it stands today, it's almost like a badge of honor for a big company to brag about the large number of patents they've received. (Didn't IBM recently make it kind of a "selling point" that they patented over 170 things in one year, recently?) In reality, we should be asking if they released "over 170 new and innovative products" with those patents. If not, why not?


All "software patents" should be made invalid. The only software patents i have ever seen have been from lazy gits who sit on some totally vague description and wait for another person or company (with money) to trip over it.
 
Can someone get them to explain to me why they need to sue NOW? I mean this flagrant abuse of their intellectual property has been going on for years. What makes them raise a stink about it NOW instead of THEN?

Guess they just now ran out of money from the Microsoft settlement. Time to go for broke. :rolleyes:
 
Look how many ideas APPLE patents and has done nothing with. They came up with the idea, they patented it basically putting on record that it's their idea. Then someone else comes along does the same thing and gets sued by Apple.

YOU WOULD BE CHEERING FOR APPLE . and rightfully so. It was their idea.

If this guy truly developed that and got a patent for it, then APPLE and all those companies HAVE been using his property without any kind of pay.

Just because he took so long to bring it to court doesn't make APPLE's and all the others' actions any less illegal.

The only thing I can say against this guy is there should be a statute of limitations on suing over patents. We can't all live in fear that something we're using from somewhere else that's become common to use, might have been patented 20 years ago.


As far as the wheel thing... if one guy thought it up and a guy on the other side of the world started producing it, well it was still the first guy's idea no matter how far away they were. They weren't far enough away that the second guy couldn't hear of the idea from the first guy.

or

If the second guy came up with the very same idea on his own without knowledge of the first guy and did something with it, that's very different. Cases have been won in favor of someone who came up with the same idea later without previous knowledge of the first idea.
 
I have a patent for using letters that look like "e"
You're all going down!

“If,” said His Honor, you can’t find any fun during childhood, you naturally won’t look for it as you grow up to maturity. You will grow ‘hard,’ and look upon fun as foolish. Also, if you don’t furnish fun for a child, don’t look for it to grow up bright, happy and loving. So, always put in a child’s path an opportunity to watch, talk about, and know, as many good things as you can.”

From "Gadsby" by Ernest Vincent Wright
 
If this guy truly developed that and got a patent for it, then APPLE and all those companies HAVE been using his property without any kind of pay.

Should than the University of California, San Francisco, sue Eolas founder Michael Doyle because he developed his patented technology based on work done while working there?
 
I'm not one who thinks that software patents should be banned completely. Surely there are some valid ideas that fully deserve to be protected. However, given the speed at which technology and software evolves, I don't think the patent should last more than 2 or 3 years.
 
Look how many ideas APPLE patents and has done nothing with. They came up with the idea, they patented it basically putting on record that it's their idea. Then someone else comes along does the same thing and gets sued by Apple.

YOU WOULD BE CHEERING FOR APPLE . and rightfully so. It was their idea.

Please point out an instance where Apple has surreptitiously filed for a patent on an idea (ie, one that would not become highly public knowledge the moment it was filed), never developed a concrete product based on that idea, and then prosecuted a third party for infringing on it.

Anything?

Didn't think so.

If this guy truly developed that and got a patent for it, then APPLE and all those companies HAVE been using his property without any kind of pay.

It's not that cut and dry. For a patent to be valid it must be proven a large enough leap from prior art that no one else would likely have come up with it themselves. The problem is that the patent law system places absolutely none of this burden of proof on the patent filer (aside from a hit-and-miss system of cursory "peer" review, you could file a patent for breathing in Oxygen and expelling CO2 and would stand a pretty good chance of it going through), and all of the burden on the patent "violator". This is why most places roll over for patent trolls: it is a lot cheaper to just pay the guy something than to pay a team of lawyers three times as much to prove that you don't owe him anything and if you pay off the patent troll then the next company (ie, your competition) has a higher burden of proof to achieve.

Just because he took so long to bring it to court doesn't make APPLE's and all the others' actions any less illegal.

It's important to keep terms straight here. Patent violation is not "illegal" in the common sense; it is a patent violation. This may seem a small detail, but "illegal" acts pertain to things which are against the law, which will generally be prosecuted in the public's interest; patent violations are a civil matter, and rarely as cut-and-dry as legal violations tend to be.

One major thing to note that charges of illegality here in the US are "innocent until proven guilty"; civil charges such as patent violations are "guilty until proven innocent".

As far as the wheel thing... if one guy thought it up and a guy on the other side of the world started producing it, well it was still the first guy's idea no matter how far away they were. They weren't far enough away that the second guy couldn't hear of the idea from the first guy.

or

If the second guy came up with the very same idea on his own without knowledge of the first guy and did something with it, that's very different. Cases have been won in favor of someone who came up with the same idea later without previous knowledge of the first idea.

Ummm ... that second case is very explicitly what was posited, thus the "on the other side of the world". The Internet didn't exist when the wheel was invented (although, to be fair, neither did patent law :) )

Specifically with patent law, there is a burden on the second guy to prove that he came up with the idea on his own and not as a result of hearing about the first guy's idea.
 
I have a patent for using letters that look like "e"
You're all going down!

In this situation I will not do such a marking again. You will not obtain any cash from me ............ oh bugger!


OT - this is a sure sign of a capitalist system gone quite mad.
 
I never did truly understand the original Microsoft shaft (sorry, suit); how come it was down to a court in texas to decide? Isn't there some kind of higher law body that these kind of cases can be referred to, to hopefully get a more balanced decision?
 
Yes, I agree, but where to stop? In the past you could patent actual inventions, now you can patent ideas and concepts. As we are dealing more and more with information and less with objects this is expected. There is no more a clear line separating the two; hence, all the contentious around patents infringement, copyrights, non-disclosure agreements, non-competitive clause in contracts, usb ids, piracy, etc.

Everybody is in the same boat, Apple included. Just look at Apple's patents published in MacRumors in the last few months.

You can't get patents like that outside the USA, you only have your govt to blame, well Dubya!
 
I hope this suit is laughed out of court. This is just ridiculous!

Apparently not so ridiculous, since they already got 500 million out of Microsoft (or whatever Microsoft was stupid enough to settle for!). So now they have precident on their side. It's like the Linux suits a while back. The whole consortium of companies will have to stand up together and fend off this nutcase.
 
Couldn't Apple just pay to have this guy assassinated or something instead?
It's what I'd do.
 
Apparently not so ridiculous, since they already got 500 million out of Microsoft (or whatever Microsoft was stupid enough to settle for!). So now they have precident on their side. It's like the Linux suits a while back. The whole consortium of companies will have to stand up together and fend off this nutcase.

Surely if it was settled out of court then there is no legal precedent? I know very little of the law so it's a genuine question...
 
Software patents are used for one purpose only -- to stifle innovation. The only people getting rich are the lawyers.

Though, software patents are also necessary to keep the industry floating along -- without them, you'd have content entering the public domain as soon as it was released.

If we were totally reliant on people developing software in their spare time with no expectation of profit, I think the computer world would be a vastly different looking place -- and not necessarily for the better.

There's a fine line to walk here that Congress chooses not to dabble in. Thus, you end up with patent squatters and an entire industry of litigation that costs the consumers millions of dollars in increased end cost.
 
Surely if it was settled out of court then there is no legal precedent? I know very little of the law so it's a genuine question...

Depends on what stage it settled out of court. In this case, it sounds like the case progressed far enough for Microsoft to know they'd better pony up the cash and get out while the gettin' was good.
 
What?!!!

Might as well sue the whole free world.

Al Gore might as well sue them too for using the internet. :p
 
I consider this legal suicide. It's going against the legal powers of Apple, JPMorgan and Google combined.

Fortune 500 companies that can and wil squash patent trolls like these guys. Seriously, JC Penny? Frito-Lay? WTF do they do besides sell clothes and food? Make web browsers?

In any case, this is going to be a bloodbath.
 
I consider this legal suicide. It's going against the legal powers of Apple, JPMorgan and Google combined.

umm... microsoft is no legal slouch. and they got their asses handed to them.

the patent has essentially been verified... it already won them $500 million.

what legal argument / trickery would apple/google/chase be able to perform that microsoft couldn't?

i know we all love apple here, but lawyers are just lawyers. :)

the problem is the system is set up to allow them, legally and totally within their rights, to sue and win exactly these cases.

and so... we just have to add that stupid code fragment that allows flash to work in ALL our code... not just IE.

these guys are jerks, for sure. but the system is ****ing broke. everyone knows it is broke... but no one who can change it has any reason to. god bless america.
 
Though, software patents are also necessary to keep the industry floating along -- without them, you'd have content entering the public domain as soon as it was released.

If we were totally reliant on people developing software in their spare time with no expectation of profit, I think the computer world would be a vastly different looking place -- and not necessarily for the better.
You have no clue what you're talking about. Patents have nothing to do with software developers' profits. See copyright law.
 
And i thought this was ridiculous the first time round.

Now they decide the whole internet has been infringing a patent :rolleyes:
 
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