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Apple Hit With $625 Million Judgment in Patent Suit Over Cover Flow, Spotlight, Time Machine
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My thoughts exactly. A complete mockery of the system. It's akin to filing a suit against the Yankees in Boston for the love of Pete. There need to be special judges in these cases with specific expertise. You can't have Joe and Jane deciding a monetary award. It becomes too prejudicial.
So now you're taking away the constitutional right to a jury trial?
Why wouldn't he be serious? I write software for a living and software patents are garbage.
Edit: Fixed your use of "you're".
No one said it was a right, but Congress has passed laws for Intellectual Property, which people take advantage of and seek protection under. So, whether Congress can or cannot is not a question because they have. Also, it is not a political question in any way shape or form.
There is a lot of case law that has interpreted what "promotes the progress of science and useful arts." So, people do have an idea of what can and cannot be protected.
mdelvecchio said:
Please read my above post.
Ideas are just as valid (if not moreso) as an implementation. Once I come up with an algorithm the code implementation is a trivial side effect... usually just proof of concept. It's something I generally toss over the wall to one of my interns and they whip it up in a day or so (after I have spent months developing the algorithm).
Why should my intern get to protect his trivial code with copyright when all of the work went into the development of the algorithm? BOTH are valid outputs that should be protected in order to allow someone to make a living doing either job... algorithm or code development.
The US is going to have to deal with this issue as we've long since passed into the "knowledge worker" realm where the output of the majority of our workers is no longer physical. As a country we HAVE to protect ideas in order to have a viable economy in the future.
That said... That protection does need some major revisions...
My thoughts exactly. A complete mockery of the system. It's akin to filing a suit against the Yankees in Boston for the love of Pete. There need to be special judges in these cases with specific expertise. You can't have Joe and Jane deciding a monetary award. It becomes too prejudicial.
The judge does not have to know programming to decide whether a law has been violated. It is simply dealing with a question of law and whether a law has been violated. In this case, whether a patent has been violated. That is the issue before the court in this instance.
I don't think any of us are in a position to state who was right and wrong without reading the patents in question and the infringement claims first.
This goes both for those for and against Apple.
Nothing's ever black and white.
This goes both for those for and against Apple.
Nothing's ever black and white.
Yep, no different than Apple filing suit against HTC in Delaware (or Nokia versus Apple), since the Eastern Texas and Delaware district judges and juries overwhelmingly favor the patent holder.
The USPTO is backed up. They get a lot of applications, and there's a lot of work searching for prior art, drafting rejections, considering new arguments, etc.
Nope and apple has done its share of patent filings and suing so for those who complain about patents, apple does use them and they also sue. Is it wrong, who knows. Is it a patent troll, does it really matter? Who cares if the patent is held by a patent troll or a company that produces real goods and services. Apple was found in violation of the patent.
When its apple filing, the fan boys applaud for protecting apple's IP but when they're hit with a lawsuit those people suing apple are patent trolls.
That would work if patents weren't complicated and expensive to file. I agree that it seems anyone with an idea can file it and then wait for the real innovators to do the hard work. In the case of these patents, it seems they are generic but good ideas that have little value until someone does the hard work of developing and marketing the product. I don't think they have to prove that apple stole the idea, rather it is just that they came up with an idea that someone else already filed. Apple files patents constantly for just that reason. What I think is that the judgments should reflect wether or not the idea was stolen from the patent holder and how much or little the patent determines the originality of the final product. It seems to me that these ideas are not that original, ie cover flow is just like any old jukebox out there. How original is it to say "do that but in software form on a monitor." he must have outlined more than that to get the patent. If not, if it truly is that simple, as I have seen in some of the patents filled by Apple, then I need a patent lawyer to start filing some of the stupid ideas I have. Sadly, the true investment in patents is in the legal fees to file them and then sue when someone else turns them into real products. The professor in this case made the smart move of filing loads of patents and then sitting back waiting for someone to do just that. I imagine it would be smart to clandestinely start wisper campaigns to get some company to try to develop.
This is absolutely true. If you want to fix it, you have to allocate the funds to the office so that they are more efficient. The Patent Office is just like any other government office. Things take time. When you apply for a trademark or patent protection, the attorney assigned the application has to review it, at times with the attorney filing the patent application, and they have to cross check the system and the database to see if that application infringes on an existing patent or trademark.
what art? was it presented at trial? if so, how did they lose? if not, why not?
You missed it. We need Judges to decide the Monetary Award, not a Jury. Especially in a well known District for Insane Jury Awards. I'm not discussing if a law was broken, simply who decides the award. Joe and Jane America are simply too prejudicial in many cases, and most have their collective heads up their buttocks in Patent Awards.
You missed it. We need Judges to decide the Monetary Award, not a Jury. Especially in a well known District for Insane Jury Awards. I'm not discussing if a law was broken, simply who decides the award. Joe and Jane America are simply too prejudicial in many cases, and most have there collective heads up their buttocks in Patent Awards.
You do realize that if the judge feels the jury has reached a conclusion incorrectly he/she can throw away that verdict and change the result of the case. Furthermore, the judge explains to the jury what is necessary to conclude whether an award is just or not (jury instructions). The jury does not arbitrarily decide a random amount. In other words, the judge does decide whether the amount should go before the jury. If juries were making calculations the system would be even worse than what it is now.
But how can you patient a process? Apple and Mirror both wrote a process on how to back up data as a complete backup. You can patent the code behind it, but not the process.
It would be like Apple or Microsoft having a patient on a "Computer Operating System." Apple / Microsoft / Linux / Unix....etc could all sue each other because "I patented a Computer Operating System." But the code behind each OS (Windows vs Mac) is so different how can you sue for this...it does the "same thing" just in different ways.
Patent the code, patent the name, but if everyone patented the process how it is done, everyone would just patent sue everyone.
Didn't Microsoft also rip off Cover Flow for Xbox Live?
Actually they borrowed the interface from Windows Media Center.
Pharmaceutical companies, for example, can patent the process of making a pill so that no one else can make or duplicate it.
And they did, both MS and Apple had long running lawsuits, and it wasn't until Jobs return to apple did they agree to stop the lawsuits. Microsoft giving something like 250million to cash strapped apple certainly didn't hurt things either