61–70 of 90 posts
This is seriously good news for everyone. What this means to me as a start-up guy is that I can tomorrow start a phone company based on an Open Source OS like Android and still not worry about getting sued for trivial BS patents like these. I hope more of such patents are invalidated.
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I would also love to have 1 sq mile of land in downtown Manhattan on which to develop a high-rise. But I'm just a little guy. The darn property tax system is set out to screw me. This is really the whole reason that corporations were invented: so that people could pool their resources together to achieve things that a single person could not achieve. In fact, they used to just be temporary and when the original state…
@andrewcooke: There is an analogous situation to property taxes though -- Rezoning a property. If you can acquire land zoned for something cheaper like residential or agriculture and get the city to re-zone it to commercial it's almost always worth a lot more. Overnight the property is worth a lot more and the property taxes will jump, so you'll either need to get the money to develop it yourself or sell it off to a…
I always understood the purpose of patents was to provide incentive to bring trade secrets out into the documented open for the long-term benefit of society by having a great body of knowledge that anyone can use. So understanding of great inventions didn't disappear with the inventor. A short-term exclusivity on using the technology was the way to provide renumeration for being willing to share your discoveries with the public.
Rubber band scrolling is a cute, even useful, discovery, but it seems like it could be duplicated by just about anyone without any knowledge of what would otherwise be trade secrets. Is that worth documenting for future generations in this way given the high social costs of taking such documentation?
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No. But the design of their products. If you followed the trial, they told the entire process on how they reached the final design of iPhone. It took them years to make it perfect. Taking inspiration is different, and we all know what samsung did for staying in market. LEGALLY, apple had no choice but to take these silly looking patent to the courtroom. Now is the time when we will see real innovation. I don't know w…
I don't begrudge having patent nukes for deterrence purposes. I begrudge using them offensively.
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> The USPTO does not receive any funding from general taxation sources. Rather, the agency is fully funded by the fees paid by patent applicants and patent owners. This is probably a big part of why the USPTO sucks. If they had the resources to hire dozens and dozens of industry experts, and pay them aggressively competitive wages, they could probably fix most of the problems most of us have with the system as a whol…
I have suggested this before and will do so again: Just like ROTC, Department of Education can create an Engineering Corps that allows tech students that receive government loans to pay back their debt in form of service.
What you're saying is, de facto, that they should pay examiners more -- enough to be competitive with that -- in the form of student loan repayment. But then where does the money come from, and if it's available then why not reduce turnover by just paying examiners that much whether they have student loans or not?
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Years refining this overscroll effect?
No. But the design of their products. If you followed the trial, they told the entire process on how they reached the final design of iPhone. It took them years to make it perfect. Taking inspiration is different, and we all know what samsung did for staying in market. LEGALLY, apple had no choice but to take these silly looking patent to the courtroom. Now is the time when we will see real innovation. I don't know w…
I could probably see many things in iOS/the iPhone worth patenting, but this is not one of them.
I'm not against Apple, I'm against ALL useless patents like this and probably many of Samsungs'.
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Or we could just let them keep all the money they collect in fees, and let them set the fees at a level that would let them afford to do a good job.
No, that won't work - the USPTO is already a profit center, so why aren't they doing a better job right now? Being paid more to approve more patents is a perverse incentive so egregious it's incredible the system was setup like it was. No matter what the fees are, decreasing the percentage of patents granted will effectively cut the budget of the agency. Even upper management that is sympathetic to the cause of incre…
Then they have an incentive for more applications, but little perverse incentive to approve them.
Of course, if they get a reputation for denying spurious claims then they won't get as many applications from spurious applicants, but that's true regardless of their funding source -- you can't produce a sensible budget without considering the number of applications they're expected to process. If the PTO's goal is budget maximization then they'll want to maximize the number of applications, which means providing incentives (in the form of low standards for patentability) for applicants to file more applications. You can't really fix that without creating some powerful incentives for not approving bad patents, like fining the head of the PTO $100K personally for every patent the PTO approved and the courts have to invalidate.
Sad. This is not a generic patent. It only seemed obvious now. Its not something that will stop innovation (as people scream about). A scrollbar implemented without rubber-band effect will do just fine. And why was this never implemented before anyways. There is all this hype that "Apple is Bad because they sued Samsung". But considering everything, they had no other choice legally. They had to make a case on some gr…
> But considering everything, they had no other choice legally. Patents are not Trademarks. Patents are valid and legal even if you don't enforce them (where trademarks become invalid if you don't enforce them). So no, they did have a choice. In fact, they had 3: 1. They could have not gotten the patent at all. This could open them up to legal liability if someone else got it and sued them. 2. They could have kept it…
Sad. This is not a generic patent. It only seemed obvious now. Its not something that will stop innovation (as people scream about). A scrollbar implemented without rubber-band effect will do just fine. And why was this never implemented before anyways. There is all this hype that "Apple is Bad because they sued Samsung". But considering everything, they had no other choice legally. They had to make a case on some gr…
> But considering everything, they had no other choice legally. Patents are not Trademarks. Patents are valid and legal even if you don't enforce them (where trademarks become invalid if you don't enforce them). So no, they did have a choice. In fact, they had 3: 1. They could have not gotten the patent at all. This could open them up to legal liability if someone else got it and sued them. 2. They could have kept it…
Sad. This is not a generic patent. It only seemed obvious now. Its not something that will stop innovation (as people scream about). A scrollbar implemented without rubber-band effect will do just fine. And why was this never implemented before anyways. There is all this hype that "Apple is Bad because they sued Samsung". But considering everything, they had no other choice legally. They had to make a case on some gr…
> But considering everything, they had no other choice legally. Patents are not Trademarks. Patents are valid and legal even if you don't enforce them (where trademarks become invalid if you don't enforce them). So no, they did have a choice. In fact, they had 3: 1. They could have not gotten the patent at all. This could open them up to legal liability if someone else got it and sued them. 2. They could have kept it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have suggested this before and will do so again: Just like ROTC, Department of Education can create an Engineering Corps that allows tech students that receive government loans to pay back their debt in form of service.
I'm generally all for anything that involves government paying for college, but I don't think you're solving the problem in this case. The problem is that good engineers are expensive. Median base pay is what, about $90-100K? Which the patent office isn't willing to pay. What you're saying is, de facto, that they should pay examiners more -- enough to be competitive with that -- in the form of student loan repayment.…
The patent system can be made more reasonable if we address the problem of bogus patents issued by an overwhelmed USPTO. This would be a step in the right direction.
All that said, if tech heads aren't willing to serve their country, even for a one lousy year, they really should stop complaining about the broken services.