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I received a patent infringement email for my weekend project (2010)

royvanrijn.com

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Re: I received a patent infringement email for my weekend project (2010)

#21

Post by D13Fd »

nzentzis wrote: post #19
btrettel wrote: post #14

Former patent examiner here. One problem I've seen time and time again with respect to patents on Hacker News is that people don't read the patent claims, the legally enforceable part of a patent. They just assume that because some journalist or blogger or attorney or whatnot says that this patent covers something, it must cover all instances of that. And that would be a big problem, preventing people from using a te…

Can you recommend a good reference/source for translating legalese? I'm not sure I've ever found a good source for determining which words should be interpreted normally and which are landmines. The ambiguity about what words mean may be part of why people assume patents are so broad. Most people know that some words and phrases, when used in a legal context, have vastly different (more specific, broader, or even com…

The real answer is three years of law school plus a couple of years of work in the relevant field.

If you want a taste of what it involves, for patent law, here is one of the seminal cases on how to construe claim terms, Phillips v. AWH Corp., 415 F.3d 1303 (Fed. Cir. 2005):

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=220719574132079...

Re: I received a patent infringement email for my weekend project (2010)

#22

Post by btrettel »

nzentzis wrote: post #19
btrettel wrote: post #14

Former patent examiner here. One problem I've seen time and time again with respect to patents on Hacker News is that people don't read the patent claims, the legally enforceable part of a patent. They just assume that because some journalist or blogger or attorney or whatnot says that this patent covers something, it must cover all instances of that. And that would be a big problem, preventing people from using a te…

Can you recommend a good reference/source for translating legalese? I'm not sure I've ever found a good source for determining which words should be interpreted normally and which are landmines. The ambiguity about what words mean may be part of why people assume patents are so broad. Most people know that some words and phrases, when used in a legal context, have vastly different (more specific, broader, or even com…

For an accessible introduction to patent legalese, I'd recommend taking a look at a recent edition of the book Patent It Yourself by David Pressman. I can't say it'll cover all that I learned as an examiner, but it's well written and covers a lot.

Also: A lot of the legalese I encountered as a patent examiner was "lexicographic definitions", that is, where a patent applicant writes somewhere in the patent specifications that a certain term or phrase has a particular meaning. Applicants didn't always make those easy to find... I recall one where (as I recall) they defined "insulation" to including something that can cool something down, which strikes me as simply wrong and confusing. That definition was basically hidden right in the middle of the patent application. It was necessary to find that definition to understand the claims. If the term is something I hadn't seen before then I would have just search for it, but for something common in the field I examined like "insulation", I wouldn't normally search for that. This is really annoying and unfortunately okay under USPTO rules.

Re: I received a patent infringement email for my weekend project (2010)

#23

Post by Havoc »

The whole system isn’t fit for purpose given how vulnerable it is to this sort of abuse. Even if one accepts patents as a useful construct the practical implementation makes it a net negative Id say

It shouldn’t take millions for someone innocent to defend themselves.

Re: I received a patent infringement email for my weekend project (2010)

#24

Post by stjohnswarts »

btrettel wrote: post #14

Former patent examiner here. One problem I've seen time and time again with respect to patents on Hacker News is that people don't read the patent claims, the legally enforceable part of a patent. They just assume that because some journalist or blogger or attorney or whatnot says that this patent covers something, it must cover all instances of that. And that would be a big problem, preventing people from using a te…

I think we all know that the patents (especially software patents) are often overly broad and won't stand up to scrutiny but us poor pissants won't be able to pay more than a month or two of lawyer fees before we lose our homes and maybe even our families. I mean it's a big row to hoe.

Re: I received a patent infringement email for my weekend project (2010)

#25

Post by roastedpeacock »

This makes me think an important question. What can individuals in western countries with imported IP-imperialism do to protect open source and other independent innovation from attempts at censorship by anti-hacking laws such as CFAA, DMCA and their foreign analogues or vaguely worded patent claims leading to a faux-monopoly on innovations?

Better to do something than wave the white flag and surrender all ideas to big-tech companies.

Re: I received a patent infringement email for my weekend project (2010)

#27

Post by pkaye »

roastedpeacock wrote: post #25

This makes me think an important question. What can individuals in western countries with imported IP-imperialism do to protect open source and other independent innovation from attempts at censorship by anti-hacking laws such as CFAA, DMCA and their foreign analogues or vaguely worded patent claims leading to a faux-monopoly on innovations? Better to do something than wave the white flag and surrender all ideas to b…

Don't use a web server located in those other countries of concern to publish your content.

Re: I received a patent infringement email for my weekend project (2010)

#28

Post by no_time »

How do people fight the urge to tell these people to fellate a phallic object and then later sign up their emails to all possible gay dating sites and spam newsletters? The audacity of these parasites to gangstalk you with patent claims of a country thousands of km away is just incredible...

Re: I received a patent infringement email for my weekend project (2010)

#30

Post by gclarkii »

It really looks like US7921296B2, which has a priority back to 2001 is prior art for 7,627,477. They both create a database of id strings which are located at specific locations within a file. They then sample the same locations in the file to be compared. The only real differences is that the US7921296B2 patent uses hash strings, while Landmarks patent uses "fingerprint object". The US7627477 does not does NOT describe how those "fingerprint object" are created. In their description they state(with a prior citation to Knuth) "One way of preparing the data to allow for fast searching is to encode the fingerprint objects into numeric tokens, such as 32-bit unsigned integers, and using the numeric tokens as a key for sorting and searching". I wonder what method are going to use to create that 32-bit uint, without collisions LOL.

And whoever wrote 7,627,477 was a moron, unless the examiner required them to restrict their comparisons to strictly audio files. But since their earliest grant also is dedicated to audio, I'm guessing they were not thinking ahead. US7921296B2 on the other hand applies to multimedia files in general.

What get's me is that it was the examiner that cited US7921296B2.

Have I misinterpreted this?

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