Live by the sword, die by the sword I guess. Apple has been busy patenting obvious VR/AR features and I have no doubt we will see them attempting to aggressively exercise these in future years to shut down alternatives to Vision Pro in the future.
Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
271–280 of 510 posts
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
From NYTimes "In court, Masimo detailed how Apple poached its top executives and more than a dozen other employees before later releasing a watch with pulse oximeter capabilities — which measures the percentage of oxygen that red blood cells carry from the lungs to the body — that were patented by Masimo." Doesn't sound like they accidentally stepped on a vague patent to me.
> Apple poached its top executives What is this? Are they some form of slaves? If company doesn't want its employees "poached" they should pay them enough money so they don't think of "switching sides". This notion that corporations can own people and their brains should stop.
It undermines any argument that the technology was so obvious it didn't deserve a patent when you are going to the company that owns the patent to poach the staff to implement your own. If it is that obvious, why aren't you just hiring engineers off the open market?
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can't agree on licensing terms, then you sell the watch without the infringing technology. Nobody (relatively speaking) is making a buy/not buy decision on the Apple Watch due to its blood oxygen monitor functionality. It's a feature that isn't important or necessary for the vast majority of people.
> It's a feature that isn't important or necessary for the vast majority of people. Do you have data on this? I think it's a pretty big deal.
If one has a serious health condition that affects blood oxygen levels, pulse oximetry can be useful. For the average healthy person, the medical value is very little to nil.
Uses of pulse oximetry: https://www.healthline.com/health/pulse-oximetry#purpose-and...
Most of the above conditions listed above occur in very sick people already under close medical supervision, with the exception of asthma. But even in asthma, pulse oximetry has limitations: https://asthma.net/living/lets-talk-pulse-oximetry
I think it’s cool the Apple Watch has this, but it’s mostly a gimmick as far as I can tell.
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#274Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
The laws are supposed to reward Masimo for their innovation by Apple paying them an appropriate licensing fee. Apple decided to circumvent that by milking them for IP in a feigned acquisition attempt and then headhunting their engineers and are going to be punished financially for not rewarding innovation. The law is working as intended.
right, but it sure looks like masimo's "innovation" is filing the patent paperwork for the general concept of how pulse oximeters have always worked, not anything new they invented. filing patents for something you didn't invent is not the law working as intended.
If that was the case Apple would have overturned this patent on the basis of prior art.
I'm inclined to trust ITC on this one more than a random dude from the internet, even though he is not a toad.
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#276All these intellectual property lawsuits look like an economic loss overall. The laws don’t work as intended if they aimed to encourage innovation
The laws are supposed to reward Masimo for their innovation by Apple paying them an appropriate licensing fee. Apple decided to circumvent that by milking them for IP in a feigned acquisition attempt and then headhunting their engineers and are going to be punished financially for not rewarding innovation. The law is working as intended.
In some narrow cases I see the value in patents motivating financial investment in original research. But most of the time this does not apply.
Optical pulse oximeters are an obvious incremental thing, and with zero knowledge of the space I don’t think it’s crazy to believe these would have come into existence on the same time frame with or without the existence of patents.
Virtually everything humans create or “discover” is an inevitability. We’re all just memetic LLMs, remixing stuff with mildly differing levels of variance. Originality is quaint pre-industrial human myth.
That said, Apple would have absolutely done the same thing if they had the patent. So I have zero sympathy for either party.
Don’t hate the player, hate the “artificially granted ownership over progress” game.
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as the cost is less than what apple makes from the watches annually, it would still be worth it, no?
Sometimes companies have poison pill provisions and similar that makes it veeeeery expensive to do a hostile takeover.
Expensive for Apple? This is a $17 billion annual revenue product category for them.
Masimo's market cap is $6 billion.
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#278I think we need a different form of patent. Current patents attempt to claim: this thing I figured out is novel and nobody else should copy me. Many times, they claim this so someone else can't claim it and thus avoid arbitration. It would be nice if we could also file: this thing I figured out is not novel and is a natural progression to the current state-of-the-art. I guess the only means of doing this currently is…
>It would be nice if we could also file: this thing I figured out is not novel and is a natural progression to the current state-of-the-art. isn't this just publishing? no formal procedure required, no government, no patent office, no filing fees, put your a record of your work somewhere that people can find it and then it can be used as prior art in a dispute.
I think they were asking for something like Creative Commons for patents. Prior to CC anyone could write a note that says “free to use” but then you would need a lawyer to do due diligence and scan each with a fine toothed comb. The value of CC is it normalized all of that so the economy around using the free thing got easier.
Yes publishing work will allow you to bring it up as a defendant. But by the time you’re called to a law office in west Texas you’re already out millions in legal fees and still run the risk of getting a judgement against you.
What I think they were asking for is something more formal.
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> some parts of them seem to definitely be a prior art The standard is to consider ALL of the elements together in the specific configuration. If this were not the case, then any invention that incorporated any conventional element (e.g., a lever) would be invalid.
It cannot be that simple, can it? Otherwise changing a single element (say "concave surface" to "sine-shaped surface", or "strap" to "clamp") would invalidate the patent.
Yes. In a well-written claim, then each limitation is only there because it was necessary to get the examiner to allow the patent (i.e., to be valid in light of the known prior art).
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#280Masimo, the company who is suing apple, has a market cap around ~$6B. Apple's wearable business (which might include the audio products as well, I guess), at least according to the article, "generated $13.48 billion in revenue". Don't think this is as big of a threat as someone like Samsung suing iPhone.
Masimo is a well-known and regularly discussed name in med tech (ask me how I know). I can't comment on how Apple perceives them, but Masimo is much, much more than a no-name patent troll.
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