Patent Troll Goes After Notebook Cooling 131
An anonymous reader writes "If you are manufacturing notebooks and you are using hardware that needs to be cooled down occasionally, you may be in the crosshairs of IPventure, which claims patent rights to an approach that is common in all notebooks today. For now, the company appears to be establishing its case by suing Fujitsu and Lenovo over the use of its invention in the Lifebook and Thinkpad series of products."
Re:Submarine patent? (Score:5, Interesting)
All this "treble damages" stuff for people who willfully infringe is so onesided.
There should be penalties for patent holders who willfully allow infringement in the name of increased damages.
One key problem with patents (Score:4, Interesting)
is that there is no adversarial position, as in a civil or criminal lawsuit.
This means there is no effective counterpoise to the seeker of the frivolous patent, since the patent office itself has nothing to lose from rank incompetence.
An attorney team whose reward is correlated with the number of patents it gets dismissed or invalidated would be quite interesting.
Then we need to work on the broad strokes of varying patentable periods depending on the field at hand. Drugs, software, and shoes probably ought to be patentable for differing periods of time.
Re:Submarine patent? (Score:4, Interesting)
My understanding is that patent examiners simply go off the information that's filed alongside the patent. If a patent isn't really novel, they wait until a re-examination request comes in - usually as a result of litigation around the patent.
A penalty for deliberately trying to mislead the patent examiners would go a long way towards resolving this problem...