Steve Jobs Video Kills Apple Patent In Germany 100
An anonymous reader writes "Today the Federal Patent Court of Germany shot down an Apple photo gallery bounce-back patent over which Cupertino was/is suing Samsung and Motorola. A panel of five judges found the patent invalid because the relevant patent application was filed only in June 2007 but Steve Jobs already demoed the feature in January 2007 (video). While this wouldn't matter in the U.S., it's a reason for a patent to be invalidated in Europe. For different reasons someone thought the iPhone presentation was a mistake. It now turns out that when Steve Jobs said "Boy have we patented it!" his company forgot that public disclosure, even by an inventor, must not take place before a European patent application is filed. But Apple can still sue companies over the Android photo gallery: in addition to this patent it owns a utility model, a special German intellectual property right that has a shorter term (10 years) and a six-month grace period, which is just enough to make sure that history-making Steve Jobs video won't count as prior art."
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What a factually accurate first post.
Re:Europe (Score:5, Insightful)
Europe wonders why it has zero innovation and everyone floods to the valley. Enjoy those H1Bs!
the fuck has this to do with anything? it's fucking simple: if you want to patent it don't fucking show it around the town. the american model however is stupid, where you can troll people to using your patent by showing them the invention and then sue them!
Re:Europe (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. In the USA you can hand your stuff to a "standards body", then stab anyone who uses it in the back if your patent gets approved later (see also: Submarine Patents [wikipedia.org] and Rambus's dishonesty a decade ago [kickassgear.com] that drove up DRAM prices for a long while).
People can complain about the European patent system but they do a lot of things better than the USA:
- Stopping submarine patents and patent trolls.
- Actually doing due diligence on first-discovery vs. the nonsensical "first to file"
- Actually doing due diligence to keep the Obvious and Trivial patents out
- Actually doing due diligence to be sure someone isn't trying to patent something already patented
In fact, overall the US patent office doesn't do "due diligence" on almost anything anymore. I can't blame them since they are far underfunded to handle the glut of patent-slamming from major US corporations, but it does kind of make the US patent system a laughingstock elsewhere in the modern world.
Seriously, what sort of incompetence do you have to have on display to have someone actually manage to patent the peanut butter and jelly sandwich [nbcnews.com]?
Re:Europe (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, what sort of incompetence do you have to have on display to have someone actually manage to patent the peanut butter and jelly sandwich [nbcnews.com]?
Or the combover hairstyle [google.com]. (Ostensibly to conceal baldness, but it usually just makes it more obvious...)
Or swinging sideways on a swingset [google.com].
There ain't shit that the US Patent Office does that passes any kind of smell test. The word incompetence doesn't begin to describe the situation.
Re:Europe (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it incompetence, or a system which is measured as successful by how many patents it processes and accepts?
I don't get the impression the USPTO has any incentive to do their job thoroughly and competently -- but that this is what they've been told to do by the government.
Just keep cranking out patents and let the courts decide seems to be how they operate.
Re:Europe (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps it's how the US claims it's still innovating, when the opposite is actually happening because of it.
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Perhaps it's how the US claims it's still innovating, when the opposite is actually happening because of it.
Metrics, dear. "Innovation" is measured in patents per second and copyright filings per second. The more you have, the more "innovative" you are.
The fact that patents and copyright filings are a by-product of innovation rather than innovation in itself doesn't cross these dipshits minds because you can't easily measure real innovation.
Re:Europe (Score:5, Informative)
Stupid is as stupid directs.... (Score:2)
Is it incompetence, or a system which is measured as successful by how many patents it processes and accepts?
I don't get the impression the USPTO has any incentive to do their job thoroughly and competently -- but that this is what they've been told to do by the government.
Just keep cranking out patents and let the courts decide seems to be how they operate.
I agree with you that it would seem to be a logical step for the USPO to take, b
Re:Stupid is as stupid directs.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you miss my point, I'm saying "approve them and let the courts figure it out" is what they do now, not that they should start doing it.
Oddly enough, you'll note that I did exactly that. It was the post I replied to who said they were incompetent.
This may come as a shock to you, but my government and your government are likely two different entities.
If I contact my government about how many stupid patents the US Patent Office approves, I'd get nowhere.
But the existence of a patent for sideways swinging and some of the other stupid things I've seen tell me that either these guys are truly grossly incompetent, or have been told to approve everything to collect the fees.
You don't need to be an American to look at some of the stupid patents which have been granted and wonder what the hell they were thinking.
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Clearly, the geek and nerd community feels it is the latter role that they should be full filling
Clearly, the law as written disallowing obvious patents agrees with us. Legal code: 35 U.S.C. 103 (A)
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I don't get the impression the USPTO has any incentive to do their job thoroughly and competently -- but that this is what they've been told to do by the government.
Just keep cranking out patents and let the courts decide seems to be how they operate.
While that kind of platitude is great for an easy +5 on Slashdot, anybody who actually practices in patents is all too aware that it's not true. In about 99% of patent applications, the examiner's first office action is a rejection. Under Dudas, a Bush appointee (who was not even statutorily qualified to run the patent office), the "Reject, Reject, Reject" culture was so bad that his most onerous round of patent rules spawned litigation that got the rules overturned. Things got a little better under Kappos,
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A patent for a variation in image transition, whether image to image, image to end of file, image to new folder, image to different grade of image whether size or quality, image to different category of image etc. is clearly bullshit as the whole idea of image transitions is clearly obvious and has been explored in media to the nth degree over the last century. Any patent office that would approve is clearly corrupt and is only interested in passing as many patents as possible to fill US courts and make jo
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I read the side-to-side swing patent, but that's just a method of swinging. How can you patent that? Can you sue me for how I use a swing? or how I walk, if you patented that?
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If you hold a patent that hasn't been invalidated by a court, then likely yes.
Now, as to how you could possibly patent a comb-over or swinging sideways ... well, that's a fascinating question.
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These would be rejected in the UK for not having industrial applicability.
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No. You, as an individual, are free to use a patented idea for your own personal use any way you see fit. However, you're not allowed to sell or distribute to anyone else anything based on that patented concept until the patent expires. On the other hand, if someone were able to copyright the act of swinging sideways you, as an individual, could be enjoined from swinging sideways. That's in the U.S. Don't know about other countries.
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"Too Obfuscatory" (yes, I had to look that form up) should be a reason for rejecting a patent. That way, patent examiners can just take a look at it, and if they cannot figure out what the hell is going on or come up with a clear picture of the patented object in question on first read, they can reject it outright without wasting more time on it.
Re:Europe (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, overall the US patent office doesn't do "due diligence" on almost anything anymore.
What do you mean "anymore"? They didn't before either, which is why unscrupulous people like Edison could trawl for European and Russian inventions, and then patent them in the US.
(And then have the public believe these patent trolls were inventors, but that's a different side of the story.)
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The funny thing is that this would not be an issue had Apple been a German company. If BMW had a feature demonstrated on a car before it was patented, the German court would uphold it. Apple, being a US company (and thus the target of anti-US sentiment) is an easy target.
Do you have prove for this claim?
Just because in the US you do things this way (Apple vs. Samsung, Apple vs. HTC) doesn't mean that others do as well.
You should know that we Germans are sticklers for rules.
Oh, and this myth of rampart anti-US sentiments in Germany isn't really true, either.
Re:Europe (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and this myth of rampart anti-US sentiments in Germany isn't really true, either.
Though the US seems to be working very hard to make sure that anti-US sentiment round the globe in general remains high. :(
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Oh, and this myth of rampart anti-US sentiments in Germany isn't really true, either.
It is in Berlin. It is more of a resigned complaining about depressing facts than any kind of personal dislike. I think most people would love to see the US overcome its problems and move forward, but they just don't believe it will happen.
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People can complain about the European patent system but they do a lot of things better than the USA: - Actually doing due diligence on first-discovery vs. the nonsensical "first to file"
How does that statement make any sense in light of this situation? The court is throwing out the patent because it can be proven that Apple has "first-discovery" before they "filed". In other words, they're fully acknowledging that the invention is novel and Apple is first, but---oops!---they filled out the paperwork in the wrong order. That doesn't sound like a "better" patent system to me, just stereotypical German.
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- Stopping submarine patents and patent trolls.
- Actually doing due diligence on first-discovery vs. the nonsensical "first to file"
- Actually doing due diligence to keep the Obvious and Trivial patents out
- Actually doing due diligence to be sure someone isn't trying to patent something already patented
I would argue that first to file is as important as first to discover. There are scoundrels and then there are SCOUNDRELS that even if they are doing discovery/invention that will falsify data to claim they were "first". The discover/invention process needs to be documented much like scientific method and independently verified.
The EU rule that a patent must be file before announcement is ludacris. Public announcement AND demonstration of a discovery/invention in fact should improve the standing of a p
Re:Europe (Score:5, Informative)
The law applies to *public* demonstrations. Not closed demonstrations covered by a solid wall of NDA's. And if you demonstrated it years ago in the US, there's no way a EU firm could hold the patent. You could still file it in the USA if noone did before you, but never in the EU. On the other hand, the guy in the audience that was a bit faster than you? Neither could he.
Don't discount the advantages because you dislike one particular disadvantage.
Re: Europe (Score:1)
If you look back at all of the US's supposed innovations, you will find them all the be 'first-filed' patents, not 'first-innovated'.
Just ask Tesla and Graham-Bell.
Patents stiffle innovation (Score:1)
I've got news for you: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=patents+stiffle+innovation
Except for the pharmaceutical industry perhaps, patents do more harm than good. (oh, lawyers apparently benefit also from patents...)
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USA! USA! USA! YEAAAAAAAAH!
In united states, you can show off your inventions before patenting them! WOOHOOO! In your face world!
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Trivial software functionality is not innovation, you stupid yank. Stop drinking the koolaid.
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Silly /. editors (Score:1, Funny)
Story title should be:
We don't think that Apple is the most innovative innovater in the innovative history of innovating innovaters (which is in itself an innovation).
and the summary should be:
Boy, have we made sure to make this story fanboy/troll bait!
It's a viral campaign for Apple's new product. (Score:2)
iRony.
They just haven't patented it yet, so they can't use the term as such but they can iMply it.
Which is also a technology that Apple is currently in the process of patenting.
Android Gallery (Score:4, Insightful)
But Apple can still sue companies over the Android photo gallery:
Please do! Maybe then, they'll replace the aforementioned crash-and-bug-laden POS with something, I dunno, functional.
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I had basically forgotten about the Android photo gallery. Worthless piece of garbage to the point where I don't even think about it, since I just treat the phone as if it doesn't have one. I installed a comics reader, but no general photo gallery app.
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I just wish viewing photos with stock software on Android wasn't so goddamn limited to the GPU texture size limits on the device. My 7 year old dell PDA can view images in their full quality through creative use of screen space, instead of keeping the whole image loaded in a downsized capacity where zooming in just shows a bunch of muddled pixels stretched across the screen.
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Never once had a problem. G1, G2 or Galaxy S3.
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2. Set default to ES Gallery
3. Profit
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The picture viewer that comes with GhostCommander also a good choice.
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The Samsung gallery application isn't the same as the stock Android one. It's a lot faster and more stable. Despite what some people would have you believe, there are actually advantages to using a TouchWiz ROM.
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Even better - he could write his own and install it.
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Yea, I could (actually I probably couldn't, since I'm not a coder), but why reinvent the wheel? GhostCommander has a fine picture-view built in.
Needs to be reversed (Score:2, Interesting)
public disclosure, even by an inventor, must not take place before a European patent application is filed
This should be reversed: no patent can be granted before the inventor has demonstrated that it really works.
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Screwy rule (Score:2, Interesting)
Not being able to tell people what you have before you tell the government? i guess that is so they can keep the creme of the crop on ideas.
Re:Screwy rule (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to keep it as some uber-special method that no-one else can use without paying you, that makes sense. If you go around to the world, showing a new technique, then later on say "oh yeah, remember that thing I told you about, if you use it you have to pay me" you get laughed at.
See how that now makes sense when it's phrased properly.
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Its still you that invented it. I don't see a problem with telling people 'hey, its mine and im first'
If you want to keep it secret you don't even apply for a patent.
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Problem is that you can have two persons working on a same thing where one does public presentation and does not want to patent the invention. Second one can then after this fact file patent for the invention and sue the former even if the invention was actually done first by the one who didn't want to file a patent for it. For open source and open ideas it's better to have a system where inventions can be made un-patentable without expensive legal process so I prefer the European system.
Re:Screwy rule (Score:5, Insightful)
In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Funny)
German apples kill Steve Jobs.
Or something like that.
first TFS linked article goes to fosspatents.com (Score:1)
why link to an admitted shill's website?
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But probably not, and that's the problem.
Like The Daily Mail, Florian Mueller has so little credibility at this point that it's impossible to trust anything he says with any degree of confidence.
Much better to go elsewhere, to somewhere with a track record of genuinely being able to report factually with some consistency.
Bouncing never should have been patentable (Score:2, Interesting)
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Yeah so all icons and user displays since the dawn of computing are fundamentally underdamped second order systems and bounce has been an inherent property of all those systems... or not.
Guess what: almost everything can be described mathematically to some degree, and, by definition, absolutely everything obeys the laws of physics. That doesn't mean that everything *is* math or *is* the laws of physics though. By your definition, the only things that should receive patents are things that can't exist... (Ye
Re:Bouncing never should have been patentable (Score:5, Informative)
If Apple wants to patent a specific algorithm which generates a bouncing behavior, then they should be able to as long as it's a novel method and nobody's done it that way before. What they should not be able to do is get a patent which prohibits anyone else from implementing any bouncing, which is exactly what's happened. At that point, the fact that this behavior is a natural consequence of some simple mathematical laws and has been known about for centuries becomes prior art.
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Prior art: Windows Solitaire
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Simulating momentum has been a UI gimmick almost as long as there have been UIs. I remember when it was all the rage for ANSI viewers to do accelerated scrolling. I think some of them even bounced when you got to the top or bottom.
But no, Apple invented everything.
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"If I come up with an invention, and not pay the state, or (in the EU) not pay the state before I publicize it, the state takes ownership of it (steals it)."
No, the public gets it. That is not the same. It was pre-shared, as it were.
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Sure - you're so smart, you're stupid. Clear.
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In order to to foster innovation society wants inventions to be pubically available so that other can improve upon them and base their inventions on the previous ones (compare "progress"). To make people publish their invention, society grants them a time-limited monopoly on their invention (a patent) in exchange for publishing their invention .
Once you already published it yourself for free, why should you get anything in exchange for publishing it in the form of a patent description anymore?
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Why would publishing it be automatically considered as an intent to give up your ownership over your intellectual property. And if that is the case, then the same should apply to copyrights. If you don't register with the copyright office your blog post, article, music, source code, graphic design, etc, before making it public, than those would automatically be public domain, where I can take your IP, put my name on it, and sell it for a profit.
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-register.html [copyright.gov]
But copyrigh
Boy have we patented it! (Score:2)
Of course, that statement was specifically and uniquely directed at the multi-touch technology and the iphone screen, which has nothing to do with this patent issue. But meh... What would be a good headline without a bit of missinformation.
Gotta hand it to Steve Jobs... (Score:3)
Even from the grave he's his own worst enemy...
It would have been invalidated anyway (Score:2)
There was far too much prior art on the concept that had already been disclosed so the patent would not have stood. I believe it isn't even valid in the US any longer.
interesting mystery then (Score:2)
Steve Jobs el padre de la tecnologia (Score:1)