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Victory Lap for Ask Patents

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#21

Post by DannyBee »

So, this sounds great and all, but I don't see any proof that it was ask patents that caused the examiner to find this, rather than the examiner's standard search?

In fact, the search history, on PAIR (look for 4-11-2013 SRFW Search information including classification, databases and other search related notes) does not say ask patents was used, nor does the search strategy (document code SRNT).

It could be the USPTO has not gotten around to noting this yet, but the only entry I see that could be related is the NPL entry, which of course, has no image available (god i love PAIR), and does not say it came from outside the search.

Don't get me wrong, I think askpatents is great, but i'm skeptical considering how examiners actually work.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#22

Post by cyanbane »

silvestrov wrote: post #14
jasonkester wrote: post #11

Pure Awesome. Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents. There are plenty (~40k/year according to the article) of bad, obvious nonsense patents already out there. It'd be nice if there were a simple process to appeal and invalidate them with similar demonstrations of prior art and obviousness. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some Wikipedia-level-OCD focused on this site to sto…

One thing missing in the patent system is that the patent seeker should pay a "fee" of $1000 if it is patentlyobvious that prior art exists. That would enable "Amazon Mechanical Turk"-style killing of most patents with prior art.

I have to think that the patent in Spolsky's example cost at least a couple grand to produce/submit. I also would love to see the cost per rejected patent produced by the USPTO that comes from US tax payer dollars.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#25

Post by willyt »

seldo wrote: post #7
ISL wrote: post #5

Trouble is, what killed the patent was prior disclosure from the researchers. The same thing has happened to friends of mine; an undergraduate's summer research presentation may have betrayed patentable inventions. An effect of the 1-year prior art rule is to force researchers to keep mum about what they're doing and to generate greater numbers of incremental patents. If you're interested in the free flow of informat…

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "prior disclosure" here. They filed a patent application: those are supposed to be public. The prior art Joel used was the documentation of the Win32 API from 5 years previously (and I'm pretty sure we've been using variable-resolution apps since earlier than 2008, and not just in Windows -- this was just an example). Could you clarify what the problem is?

App icons in OS X are interpolated between about 4 different sized images. I remember reading about this in the developer docs back in about 2002. I'd be surprised if Apple don't have pretty much the same patent on this already but registered 10 years earlier :-)

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#26

Post by roc »

cyanbane wrote: post #22
silvestrov wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing missing in the patent system is that the patent seeker should pay a "fee" of $1000 if it is patentlyobvious that prior art exists. That would enable "Amazon Mechanical Turk"-style killing of most patents with prior art.

I have to think that the patent in Spolsky's example cost at least a couple grand to produce/submit. I also would love to see the cost per rejected patent produced by the USPTO that comes from US tax payer dollars.

As the Patent office generates net revenue for the US Government, you don't have to worry about that.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#27

Post by chrisb808 »

> How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt.

I'm kind of surprised this isn't happening already.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#28

Post by rayiner »

> “Sometimes you have a picture that you want to scale to different resolutions. When this happens, you might want to have multiple versions of the image available at different resolutions, so you can pick the one that’s closest and scale that.”

This is basically mip-mapping, and was described in a 1983 paper: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=801126.

Re: Victory Lap for Ask Patents

#29

Post by ianterrell »

jasonkester wrote: post #11

Pure Awesome. Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents. There are plenty (~40k/year according to the article) of bad, obvious nonsense patents already out there. It'd be nice if there were a simple process to appeal and invalidate them with similar demonstrations of prior art and obviousness. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some Wikipedia-level-OCD focused on this site to sto…

> Shame there's not a way to do the same thing to existing software patents.

What's stopping anyone from crowd sourcing a database of prior art for existing patents that would invalidate them if it came to it?

A valid defense against patent infringement is to show that the patent shouldn't have been issued in the first place, right? So a database of Ready Made Legal Defense sounds good.

Am I missing something?

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