It's only a bullshit patent if you have pockets deep enough to take them to court over a patent issue. And, the patent holder is considered "Right" until otherwise proved.
From a qualitative perspective it's a bullshit patent, full-stop. But yes, the legal process is prohibitive, but if you demonstrate prior art to the USPTO you can request a re-examination that allows them to save face. If this patent were filed in 1988 it might have a hope of standing. It was remarkably filed in 2008, years after countless grid-based Windows manager had come and gone. It stands no hope, and the EFF w…
For future reference, anythng patented in 1988 is long-since in the public domain. ;- )
Magnet author here. We’re from Europe, Czech Republic in particular, so I don’t think we’re a viable target for a US patent troll. Glad you like our app!
Hey, I mailed you guys but you never responded :( Would it be possible to add sort of a tiling window manager mode that would disallow stacking and force any open window to adhere to a 6x6 (or whatever) grid? Sort of like Amethyst..
Sorry about that! We have considered adding more features, but it’s impossible to do that while keeping the app reliable and simple, so it’s likely to stay this way.
What's really galling about this particular patent trolling is that Rob Griffiths, principal of Many Tricks which publishes Moom, is one of the original OS X nerd's nerd. He's done so much for the OS X and the UNIX communities, having run Mac OS X Hints for more than a decade. [0] When pro users were just figuring out best practices for everything from window management to command line AppleScript (osascript) to post…
Years ago, when OS X was my preferred platform, I was really impressed from the fast and really good support of "Many Tricks". Always felt like I was supporting one of my colleagues emerging side projects and I felt quite good as he was actual taking customer care serious by trying to solve things in direct communication and not just redirecting to a FAQ or similar.
I just want to say thank you, Rob!
Keep fighting the trolls.
There are many alternatives for Mac suggested here, but I'd like to share an alternative for Win too, Windowgroomer: https://github.com/aarmea/WindowGroomer
It's stale but works perfectly on win10, has just what I want from it. Secretly, I'm suggesting it here kind of hoping someone around here likes it as much as I and feels like contributing (since I'm not very good at the Windows stuff). A great contribution would be to be able to use keyboard to set the grid, not just the mouse. That said, I've been using it a long time and it works great.
I've been using Magnet for a while now. It seems much more stable and efficient than Spectacle. Hopefully it will not end up on this chopping block as well. http://magnet.crowdcafe.com/
Magnet author here. We’re from Europe, Czech Republic in particular, so I don’t think we’re a viable target for a US patent troll. Glad you like our app!
That's all well and good, but if you get sued you still have to pay quite a lot of money to a lawyer to prove you're right, and even if you win you're still stuck with the bill.
Given the description of the law -- is that something that happens a lot in Europe? (patent troll's actually suing, and people actually defending). Your comment suggests it does unless I"m mis-reading but I'm curious what that's based on.
Some are heralding the European courts as the next hot venue for patent trolling. I am not super current on it but so far I don't think that's particularly materialized. I think the delay and uncertainty of the UPC has a lot to do with it.
I once designed an app to later realize that I was infringing dozens of patents I never knew existed before. Go and read a dozen patents, then come back and tell me they're not obvious. Most of them are ridiculously obvious, assuming you have some understanding of their given field/domain.
I was always told not to read patents. If it can be proven you're aware of a patent prior to releasing something that infringes it, you get hit with extra penalties. See [1] and [2]. [1]: http://www.dresan.com/blog/2011/04/05/i-dont-read-patents/ [2]: http://endsoftpatents.org/2010/03/transcript-tridgell-patent...
That was definitely true around the time your links were written, 2010-2011 or so. A few things have shifted in the application of treble damages and some new avenues for avoiding prolonged patent battles that have prodded many to come around on that way of thinking. Still, some entities choose to be willfully ignorant. But in my opinion, it's better to know what's out there
I was about to complain loudly about bullshit patents, but then I took some time to read the actual patent (make sure to look at the images too!), and it turns out that this patent describes a method that is very similar to what Moom does (judging by screenshots). This is not a case of the overly broad patents that we usually complain about, this is a very precise patent.
Being similar doesn't justify it as a patent. A core foundation of patents is that the invention be novel and non-obvious to a practitioner. If countless people independently -- without learning from the claims -- derive exactly the same "invention", it is an invalid patent. Of course then you have to actually get it invalidated, at great time and expense. It is completely a bullshit patent. The patent office got the…
Well, a number of comments here point to the success of the product due to that feature. If it was so obvious why didn't someone do it before?
One could argue that securing the patent puts the innovation into the public domain. Otherwise it might have stayed inside one person or company's domain. Then died with them.
When was the last time you actually read a patent to learn about a novel technology? As opposed to an article, published paper, conference talk, random blog post, or a thousand other sources? They're not particularly good forms for conveying information; they exist primarily to stake a claim on a pile of territory. That leaves aside the liabilities that reading patents to learn about technologies can open you up to,…
Yeah, this is currently a huge problem with the patent system as a whole, and can be summarized in one word: lawyers. I believe the patent system has been hijaked by lawyers and has veered off course from the original intent (even though i hate that term). The solution to this is to rewrite the written description law to reduce the burden on patentees to add in a bunch of verbosity and at the same time require more in the claims. And while we're at it to simplify the whole damn claim construction process. I'd advocate for putting examiners at the forefront of construing claims, and requiring statements by the examiners on the record of what the claims mean at the time of examination and why they are being allowed. A mini memo on claim construction at the time of allowance. This will never happen, of course.
It's difficult to say where the fault lies. I would rather live in a world of patents than not, if we insist on sticking to the idea of not forcing research and discoveries into the public domain. What would have prevented this particular case?
Usually when you create a patent there's no expert from the government who can verify that your idea is actually novel. Or complex enough to constitute an invention. So you can easily register something, write it in an unreadable way and sue people for it. Additionally there's a corrupt area int Texas where judges and lawyers have a very high tendency to rule in favor of patent trolls, because they'd have no jobs wit…
Just for anyone reading this, this is not how the patent system works anywhere in the world. Patents are examined by an examiner who is an employee of the government who exactly says that the patent is novel and non-obvious, that's what they do! No countries have a simple registration system for enforceable patents, that would be insane