Small Devs Attacked Over In-App Purchase Button Patent 229
Thornburg writes with this excerpt from a story at MacRumors:
"Yesterday, we received word from Rob Gloess of Computer LogicX ... that he had received legal documents threatening a patent lawsuit over the use of an 'upgrade' button in the lite version of his application linking users to the App Store where they could purchase the full version. 'Our app, Mix & Mash, has the common model of a limited free, lite, version and a full version that contains all the features. We were told that the button that users click on to upgrade the app, or rather link to the full version on the app store was in breach of US patent no 7222078. We couldn't believe it, the upgrade button!?!' The patent in question was filed in December 2003 as part of series of continuations on earlier patent applications dating back to 1992. The patent is credited to Dan Abelow, who sold his extensive portfolio of patents to holding firm Lodsys in 2004. Lodsys is indeed the company issuing the threats of a lawsuit regarding the patent in question."
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One button? First flush!
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The company ran out of electrolytes. You'll just have to drink from the toilet.
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That would only be applicable if it were a trademark dispute over the term "upgrade", in this case it is about something much more lucrative, payment methods.
I'm curious to see Apple's response. Buy Lodsys and lock everyone else out?
Re:What Would Officer Collins Do? (Score:5, Interesting)
IANAPL, but the 74 claims of the patent seem to cover any sort of user feed-back, interaction and results display. I suspect that the /. "Reply to This" link, "Post a Comment" button and probably the entire /. site are in violation as well. Yes, the claims are that broad and numerous.
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*facepalm*
Err, "whoosh"?
(damn...)
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This is true. A total failure on my part.
Blegh. (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps it's just best to do your technology outside of the USA and leave it to devour itself.
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Funny? Insightful.
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Re:Blegh. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Blegh. (Score:4, Informative)
That's because there's no mod for "Gallows Humor".
I hold the patent for Obvious Buttons (Score:4, Funny)
The claimant is in violation of my patent and owes me license fees.
In the amount of (holds pinkie to side of mouth) one million dollars (evil laugh) ...
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That's exactly how I felt when I heard about the RIAA suit against Limewire...
big corporations, take notice. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Um, pretty sure that, whoever this company is, they wouldn't be stupid enough to go up against Microsoft. Even companies who did have valid claims were usually driven to the brink of bankruptcy with court proceedings against Microsoft, just to have Microsoft pick them up cheap (cough - Stacker). Now, Microsoft could do the humanitarian thing and file a preliminary lawsuit against this company.
Actually, as this is an App Store thing, and both Apple and Android marketplaces have this feature, I could imagine
Here we go with idiocy again (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Here we go with idiocy again (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that the patent could be absolutely baseless, but it takes money to go to court over patent cases, especially when the plaintiff has the home field advantage in choosing the court to try the case in, what judge hears it (if you don't think a good patent lawyer knows which judges rotate to what cases, think again), and when it appears on the docket (it can always be stalled), most small developers will just settle.
These are just tactics that do work almost always taken from the RIAA playbook. I'm amazed that lawyers have not been doing this sooner.
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Exactly. If litigated, this case would probably wind up with a summary judgment of non-infringement after the claim construction hearing (that's where the court ascribes meaning to each term in the claim and thereby figures out what the actual scope of the claim is). But just getting to that point is extremely expensive, far more expensive than any small-time software developer could deal with.
On the other hand, as long as these guys haven't been sued yet, they can file first for declaratory judgment, and
Re:Here we go with idiocy again (Score:5, Informative)
According to this page [priorsmart.com] the company is suing HP, Lexmark, Samsung, Hulu, Trend Micro, Canon, Lenovo and others over the same patent (amongst others).
I'd say big companies might just be involved already.
Re:Here we go with idiocy again (Score:5, Insightful)
Or perhaps we ought to have a time out one patents, if they can't get their application through in a reasonable amount of time, then it gets denied. I find it hard to believe that something "invented" in 1992 really would take 12 years to go through the patent process without making some pretty ham fisted mistakes.
It's almost as if they were wanting to give time for others to implement the patented idea in order to sue even more people than would otherwise be possible.
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Sort of. If you publish your invention publicly, the subsequent patent becomes unenforceable upon allocation. In fact, just talking about a patent application to a large enough group will make the subsequent patent unenforceable. Sometiems, even a vague mention of a similar idea can invalidate a patent. I remember a case well where we won against a competitor who posted their cool new process on their website. Whoops...
The idea behind submarine patents was to use your secret squirrel ideas unpatented f
Rubber hose against corporate trolls? (Score:2)
The proper solution to this kind of stuff is similar to the concept of rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
This only works against actual human beings.
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.... Amazon's One click....
I hold a patent on mentioning Amazon's One Click shopping as an example.
I'll be suing you in the highest court in the world ... in Machu Picchu.
More seriously... this is where countries which do not respect this sort of garbage will be friskily sprinting past the USA in technology advancement, while innovators a are bled dry by these sort of leeches.
Remember how Patents and Copyrights were established to encourage innovation? Ha!
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Remember how Patents and Copyrights were established to encourage innovation? Ha!
I would argue that they have encouraged innovation. Look at all the innovative ways they've managed to turn the U.S. legal system into a huge MUD with lots of gold pharmers, or how many different ways they've found to transform lawyers into bedbugs and cockroaches without infringing bio-tech patents..
Appropriate Wikipedia Result (Score:2)
Oh, great... (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look at their patent portfolio:
- provide online help, customer support, and tutorials
- conduct online subscription renewals
- provide for online purchasing of consumable supplies
survey users for their impressions of their products and services
- assist customers to customize their products and services
display interactive online advertisements
- collect information on how users actually use their products and services
- sell upgrades or complimentary products
- maintain products by providing users notice of available updates and assisting in the installation of those updates.
Why do they call things "inventions"? What about prior art? What about obviousness? Methinks there should be a law against ridiculous and/or frivolous patents.
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collect information on how users actually use their products and services
Still, there might be an upside if companies can no longer spy on their users without paying license fees.
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What about algorithms? Simply taking a bunch of components (that someone else invented) and rearranging the order in which they are used or interact isn't inventive, it's just mucking about with an algorithm.
Correct. Whether you call it a process, a method, or an algorithm, the idea is the same. If you patent a wheel with spokes, someone can't come along and say "I've invented a wheel with spokes that are installed counterclockwise." That doesn't fly... well at least everywhere other than software. It all seems funny to me. The whole software IP needs a big shakeup.
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Prior art, meet procedural loopholes (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently, the particular patent involved in this case was originally filed in 1992, and then got a long series of "continuations".
Now, I haven't gone and looked at it, but I rather doubt that the patent filed in 1992, before what we know as the Internet existed, bore much resemblance to what is being claimed today...but that's the patent system for you. Anything that was created after the original filing date cannot count as prior art, so they can claim they thought of it all, even if they added various claims a decade later based on stuff they saw people already doing, by more "continuations."
Dan Aris
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Now, I haven't gone and looked at it, but I rather doubt that the patent filed in 1992, before what we know as the Internet existed, bore much resemblance to what is being claimed today...
You mean what you know of the Internet. And just because you didn't know about it, doesn't mean it didn't exist.
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Oh please, the internet as all of us know it didn't exist back then. When this patent was filed spam hadn't even been invented yet.
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Now, I haven't gone and looked at it, but I rather doubt that the patent filed in 1992, before what we know as the Internet existed, bore much resemblance to what is being claimed today...
You mean what you know of the Internet. And just because you didn't know about it, doesn't mean it didn't exist.
Yes, thank you, I'm not a total moron. That's why I said "the Internet as we know it," not simply "the Internet." And by any measure not come up with by a hopelessly literalist nitpicking jerk, what existed in 1992 was not much like the Internet as we know it today.
Dan Aris
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Apparently, the particular patent involved in this case was originally filed in 1992, and then got a long series of "continuations".
Now, I haven't gone and looked at it, but I rather doubt that the patent filed in 1992, before what we know as the Internet existed, bore much resemblance to what is being claimed today...but that's the patent system for you. Anything that was created after the original filing date cannot count as prior art, so they can claim they thought of it all, even if they added various claims a decade later based on stuff they saw people already doing, by more "continuations."
Aren't submarine patents illegal at the US Federal level, due to Symbol Technologies, Inc. et al. v. Lemelson Medical, Education & Research Foundation, LP (PDF [patenthawk.com])?
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Not illegal, but a submarine patent is not regarded as enforceable once the invention has become widely adopted. In fact, if you want to forgo foreign patents, you can stealth patent with the USPTO to your hearts content. But that case, and others, did make clear one important caveat to the stealth patent. If one claim is invalidated, the entire patent becomes unactionable. This is usually the case, but sometimes not if reasonable exception that a claim was novel can be shown. However, with these kind
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The physical device disclosed is a fax machine, office phone, or cell phone that basically has an integrated survey system, then talks about aggregating that data to improve on future devices. Unfortunately the claims are so broad they seemingly encompass any sort of method of using user feedback collected via an electronic device in a product development cycle.
The patent was issued in May 20th 2007, which because of the multi-month delay in issuing allowed patents means it was allowed by the Patent Office
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The Internet existed in 1992. The Web, as we know it, didn't, and most discussion was on newsgroups. If I remember correctly, that was the period when there was a lot of discussion about commercial use of the Internet.
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The Internet existed in 1992. The Web, as we know it, didn't, and most discussion was on newsgroups. If I remember correctly, that was the period when there was a lot of discussion about commercial use of the Internet.
So, you support my point: the Internet, as we know it today, did not exist in 1992.
Dan Aris
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The Internet existed in 1992. The Web, as we know it, didn't, and most discussion was on newsgroups. If I remember correctly, that was the period when there was a lot of discussion about commercial use of the Internet.
So, you support my point: the Internet, as we know it today, did not exist in 1992.
Dan Aris
The internet is NOT the web. The internet is just a geographically distributed network of computers (arguably using tcp/ip as it's primary protocol). It's the same now as it was then.
Re:Prior art, meet procedural loopholes (Score:4, Interesting)
Around 1990-1991, Adobe had a CD stuffed chock full of Type 1 Acrobat fonts. You could buy the entire CD unlocked, or get the CD for free, and call Adobe to unlock what fonts one wanted at the time.
From reading the patent, this seems very close to prior art, as it uses the word "system", and at the time, calling an 800 number and putting in an unlock code could be considered just as much a system as an in-app purchase under iOS.
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Methinks there should be a law against ridiculous and/or frivolous patents.
There is, right in the Constitution, but the patent office and courts ignore it -- just like most of the rest of the Constitution.
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Take a look at their patent portfolio:
- provide online help, customer support, and tutorials
- conduct online subscription renewals
- provide for online purchasing of consumable supplies
survey users for their impressions of their products and services
- assist customers to customize their products and services
display interactive online advertisements
- collect information on how users actually use their products and services
- sell upgrades or complimentary products
- maintain products by providing users notice of available updates and assisting in the installation of those updates.
Why do they call things "inventions"? What about prior art? What about obviousness? Methinks there should be a law against ridiculous and/or frivolous patents.
The whole USPTO needs a shakedown. Have you written to your Representative and Senator about it?
Major John Plaster (Score:4, Insightful)
Check "The Ultimate Sniper".
Soap and ballot boxes didn't avail. The slimebags will never stop till there is a penalty. Either suck it up or do something, all the whining hasn't accomplished anything.
Libertarians (Score:2, Insightful)
This is why we need Libertarians to control Congress and the White House so they will get rid of government (especially Federal government) supporting this kind of theft, and promote a fully Free Enterprise system where anyone can invent whatever they want and not worry about the government stealing it. Ron Paul officially announced his candidacy for President today. Let's find out if he is a true Libertarian or just some two-faced Republican and get him to take a side.
Re:Libertarians (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, 'cos I'm sure with no government getting in the way, the big boys will all agree to play nice. Yes siree, can't see any problem with that.
Patents aren't the problem, stupid patents are the problem.
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The 'big boys' have a symbiotic relationship with big government, which gives them the laws that keep competitors out of the market, funnel huge government contracts their way and bail them out when they're going bankrupt.
Eliminate big government and parasitic big business goes with it. Only actual useful big business would continue to exist.
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The 'big boys' have a symbiotic relationship with big government, which gives them the laws that keep competitors out of the market, funnel huge government contracts their way and bail them out when they're going bankrupt.
Eliminate big government and parasitic big business goes with it. Only actual useful big business would continue to exist.
I think you misspelt "corrupt" twice. It's not the size of the governemnt that matters, its who controls it.
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We only see these patent suits because it's something the government enforces. Patents are a form of taking property away from those who own it. Each inventor owns what he invents. But the government allows the first who filed for a patent to take the property away from other inventors. So the 2nd and latter inventors lose.
Of course, there always has been the risk that someone will see what is done and steal that, claiming to have invented it. The patent system was intended to encourage invention that
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Patents are a form of taking property away from those who own it. Each inventor owns what he invents. But the government allows the first who filed for a patent to take the property away from other inventors. So the 2nd and latter inventors lose.
In the US a patent goes to whoever is first to invent, in most of the rest of the world it is first to file.
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Uhm, no. That's absurd.
When the government was completely "hands-off" with corporations, we ended up with Standard Oil, who owned more than 30 cities. (yes, cities)
The cities were wholly-owned. They owned the land, the buildings, they ran the stores, they forced workers to live in these homes and buy from these stores. They employed private "police" forces, who turned out to be thugs, but since they owned the police, nobody could do anything. One time the workers went on strike because of the terrible t
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The Prize, by Daniel Yergin [wikipedia.org] gives a good a breakdown as any. It's worth a read just to expand your general knowledge of how global politics and the energy economy works.
But you don't need to look that far back. The GFC provides an excellent example. The trigger for that was a bunch of Neo-con academics (think economists who share the quasi religious faith in libertarian principles displayed in the posts above) who said "if we just get rid of the rules impeding bankers the world would be a better place".
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Paraphrasing Linus: given enough educated minds, all patents are obvious.
So no, the problem *is* that all patents are stupid.
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Yeah, 'cos I'm sure with no government getting in the way, the big boys will all agree to play nice. Yes siree, can't see any problem with that.
Patents aren't the problem, stupid patents are the problem.
No, patents are the problem. Let's look at copyright for just a sec: To infringe I have to willfully duplicate all or most of an existing work covered by copyright. Now, back to patents: To infringe I can be clever in a steel box fully detached from the rest of the world and accidentally create something that's mostly similar to something some other sucker got the the patent office first with.
Know why I'm always re-inventing the wheel? Because it's damn simple to do, and blatantly obvious -- Know why I
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Patents aren't the problem, stupid patents are the problem.
I agree. I also think sterilization is a bad idea. Microbes aren't the problem, bad microbes are the problem.
Seriously though, saying that "bad patents are the problem" is just silly. The problem is that we've created an excellent legal tool for large corporations to pummel their competitors with.
Here's the issue: we can either make patents really easy to obtain (such that any patient soul with a couple bucks for the paperwork can get one) or we can make the process as difficult and careful as possible s
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Wait, are we sure it isn't patents that are the problem?
Yes. You only restated my point, it's stupid patents that are the problem. Stupid because they aren't merit-worthy in the first place, stupid because they are obvious, stupid because they are too broad or stupid because they last too long. I don't think anybody is going to argue that patents don't need a massive overhaul, but there's no point throwing out the baby with the bath water.
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And then when the poor rise up and kill all the wealthy who have used those principles to keep the money, deprive them of health care and anything approaching a just, decent society, you can ponder that using Libertarian principles to get rid of bad patent law is the equivalent of chopping off every man's penis to eliminate rape.
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Oh, I'm personally not a Libertarian at all. There are a few things I do believe in that are very libertarian in leaning. The patent system overhaul I suggest, is one of those things that is, or should be, both libertarian and progressive supported. But I do like to call Libertarians to the carpet for being untrue to libertarianism. Another example is government issued marriage licenses. A true libertarian would get the government out of that business. Why should the government, at any level, be the g
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That Ron Paul would likely work towards good things. It's the bad things that worry the hell out of sensible people. The one thing Ron Paul is not is a pragmatist. He's a fanatic.
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20 years after that massive "redistribution" of wealth, you would find that many people were rich or poor again.
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Under statism men oppress men. Under Libertarianism it's the other way around.
Libertarianism in its modern form has been floating around for a while now. When it serves the elites (Free Trade) it becomes law. When it serves the common man (ending the war on drugs that turns cities into combat zones and saddles young men with felony convictions) Libertarian ideals are swept under the rug.
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Oh aren't you precious. I almost hope you get what you want, just so I can witness your disillusionment.
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I have an easier set of questions. Does he want government to control who marries who? What I can ingest? What women can do with their own bodies?
I am sure he will spout states rights on several. Which is just another way of him saying that he thinks the states will do his dirty work for him.
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I'm not sure there is an identifiable, unambiguously "libertarian" position on patents.
Some people believe in the right to "own" an idea or expression in the same way one owns a piece of land or a physical object. For libertarians in that camp, the artificial institution of "intellectual property" merely institutionalizes theft by artificially restricting the owner's natural rights over his property (e.g. expiring exclusive rights to patents, or allowing fair use in copyright).
Other people don't think that
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See the last section of this "Ask Slashdot" entry from 2008, for the Ron Paul campain: http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/08/02/05/1511225/Ron-Paul-Campaign-Answers-Slashdot-Reader-Questions [slashdot.org]
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If I can't trust Ron Paul to be Libertarian in social matters, how can I trust him to be a Libertarian at all? He sounds like a plain-old Republican to me. I might as well be voting for Huckabee.
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Big-L Libertarians -- as in the Libertarian Party -- want to shrink or eliminate entirely the regulatory functions of government, not the wealth-concentrating ones. Their 2008 VP candidate was a patent troll [techliberation.com]
I've been not clicking upgrade buttons for years (Score:2)
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Consider this chain... You start out with a patent for shareware software. You distribute a 'light' version of the software for cheap or free, and once you get to a certain level, or want to access a certain feature, it prints out a phone number or address to the DOS terminal to mail order a more complete version. A few years later, the internet, browsers, and graphical OSs become common. In place of the terminal printout, you hook into your OS's defined browser, and open a webpage from which you can ord
Bye guys (Score:5, Insightful)
You're a small company, they're a large company. They have powerful lawyers, you don't.
They can pretty much sue you for anything, no matter how stupid and baseless it is.
Sorry, this is the stupid way software patents are.
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At times, there are organizations (the EFF come to mind, although they seem to cover governemnt-related cases more) that have the money and lawyers to not only win the case, but win legal fees for frivolous suits. If you can hire a lawyer that can give you a good reason why you *should* win, it may be worth finding the support to ensure you can stick to the fight long enough.
Then again, it might not, too. These things should be evaluated on a case-by-base basis.
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And the Republicans are all for lawsuit overhaul ... at least for lawsuits against Republicans.
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And do you think the large companies want that? They can use it to crush the little guy. Won't ever happen.
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You would be surprised. Look at all the injury lawsuits where someone trips at a construction site. On major jobs, the foreman is allowed to dole out fairly large sums of money, to settle claims on-the-spot. It's worth a few thousand dollars, no questions asked, rather than court and lawyer fees to fight it off. Look at areas of the country where entire fields of medical practice cannot be found, because bogus malpractice suits have driven up insurance to the point you can't possibly run a solvent busin
Remove the upgrade button (Score:2)
Problem solved?
Unless you want to fight it in court.
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I wonder if a "Click here to get an enhanced experience" button would avoid the patent.
The descriptions above of other patents from this douche are as descriptive as "Pissing in a toilet bowl" and I am sure nobody would patent that (or would they?).
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come on please America... (Score:2, Interesting)
for deity's sake... it's about time all software patents were declared null and void and this entire stupidity stopped...
Stop trying to invalidate patents on technicalities and go to the heart of the matter that they are not patentable in the first place.
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This is true. But voiding all software patents would be a great first step, eliminating an entire category of nonsense.
Use it or lose it (Score:2)
I think that governments should be lobbied to enact patent reform to require patent holders to actively use and promote the patented technology within some timeframe of the patent being granted in order to continue to have patent protection. My reasoning is this: If a patent is so intrinsically valuable to you that it was worth filing the patent in the first place, then you must capitalize on it to be able to protect it. If you can't get funding or sell licenses to get a product to market within a reason
MMM I love these topics (Score:2)
The comments on these topics always suffer from Slashdot Oversimplification Syndrome.
Definitely a riot to read. Thanks guys! Keep up the... work.
This is really weird (Score:2)
For products (and information systems) that contain this Module, customers may continuously inform vendors (or developers) of their current and emerging needs. The vendors of those products may have the best opportunity to respond swiftly to a much clearer view of customer problems, product problems and market opportunities than they have today. The inventor believes that within a generation it will be normal for many products and services to include this type of Module, so that customers (in aggregate, the market) comes to play a larger role in directing and controlling the commercial development of many products and services.
Then later:
Simply put, this invention helps vendors and customers by transforming their learning cycle: It compresses the time and steps between setting business objectives, creating effective products and services, and improving them continuously. It also alters their roles: Customers become partners in the improvement process along with vendors and distributors.
Reading through the claims with my layman's understanding... I don't see any of them that even suggests a click-to-upgrade scheme might be
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Again, it's all about reporting back on the user's experience and perception - nothing to do with upgrade. In this light, I find it extremely odd that they would even attempt to file suit for violation of this patent.
Windows error reporting [flickr.com], anyone. Of course everything like this is obvious to someone trained in the art, unless you are a bunch of East Texas hicks on a jury.
Dan Abelow: inventor or idea squatter? (Score:2)
Intent makes all the difference. Regardless, the intent of Lodsys is obvious. Should its exploitation of patents in such a context be allowed at all?
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Intent has made all the difference in courts for a long time. In a murder trial, if they can prove intent - premeditation - then they pursue a conviction for a more severe charge. In this case the intent itself would be the crime, I guess.
The easiest solution to what Lodsys is doing is to outlaw the sale or transfer of patents. Make the grants non-transferable. Patents should not be that much of a commodity, if we allow patents at all.
They also invented the question mark (Score:3)
We are fortunate that patents are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. Imagine if the wheel, books, or fire had been patented.
Web site of the patent author and owner (Score:2)
http://abelow.com/ [abelow.com]
uhm you mean church and turing in the 1930s? (Score:2)
that whole turing machine thing?
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That wasn't recently proved unless you consider the 1930s recent.
Re:Is this what it is coming to? (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly?
Another reason to love capitalism; you think of gravity, the universe is your's!
Patents aren't capitalism. In fact they're almost the exact opposite of capitalism: they are government-granted monopolies on production. They were originally granted to protect individual innovators from exploitation by wealthy corporations, but almost since the laws were first passed they were used for the exact opposite purpose. They need to die, or at least be seriously reformed, but in the current pro-corporate, anti-consumer climate of, well both parties but I'm thinking of one in particular we'll never see real patent reform, just like how real health care reform and real banking reform were "compromised" to death, and even their hollowed-out husks are drawing fire from the radical right.
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I'd say they are absolutely tied to capitalism in that they are about ownership. There is no way to own the idea of an upgrade button the way you can own a mine, so the government created a fiction that lets corporations treat them the same way.
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Right. It's a government subsidy, basically. Of course, so is all property ownership--without government intervention, the only thing stopping someone from moving into your house while you're away on vacation is the security guards you hire.
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I'm inclined to agree with you. the patent seems to have a handful of base claims on which the remainder of the claims are built. Logic (which we can all guess as to its existence in the court system) would dictate that in order to infringe one of the derivative claims, the device or method would have to infringe on the parent claim.
1) A system comprising: units of a commodity that can be used by respective users in different locations, a user interface, which is part of each of the units of the commodity, configured to provide a medium for two-way local interaction between one of the users and the corresponding unit of the commodity, and further configured to elicit, from a user, information about the user's perception of the commodity, a memory within each of the units of the commodity capable of storing results of the two-way local interaction, the results including elicited information about user perception of the commodity, a communication element associated with each of the units of the commodity capable of carrying results of the two-way local interaction from each of the units of the commodity to a central location, and a component capable of managing the interactions of the users in different locations and collecting the results of the interactions at the central location.
If we assume that the commodity in question here is the app itself, the question of whether this one is infringed hinges on whether the upgrade button is considered to be elicit
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The TSA has something to say about that.