The way it works is that if you develop work that infringes, it infringes. That's all that matters. That's the point to patents. Knowledge of a patent doesn't matter. It's considered to be up to the person or company working on new products to do a patent search. It's then up to the patent holder to check out whatever seems to be infringing, and inform them.
no, you can't patent ideas, but if your product is close enough, then it infringes.
Not necessarily. A patent is supposed to cover a unique way of accomplishing things. If the solution is an "obvious" solution, it's not supposed to be patentable.
The USPO is completely overwhelmed and doesn't do the research on patent applications that needs to be done. And technology has become some complex that it would probably be almost impossible for them to do so. So they grant patents knowing that in the end, these things will be worked out by the markets or by the courts.
And while it might not apply to this lawsuit, one of the major problems with the USPO today is that it has been giving patents for obvious ideas, not only implementations of those ideas. Amazon should NEVER have received a patent for "one-click" ordering, which Apple had to license from them. The storing of someone's personal data is an obvious business process. It's like saying that if I come up with a cool way of organizing physical files in a cabinet, I should receive a patent for that.
Like taking a) melted chocolate and b) warmed milk and c) aerating the two to form a Latte.
C is an unique process that builds upon the existence of a) and b).
Quote:
Originally Posted by sprockkets
A latte is two shots of espresso, with 8-10 oz of frothed milk.
The machine that made espresso rightfully got a patent; you can't patent recipes.
I think a latte is more like pornography, there's no exact definition but I know one when I drink it. (Personally, I'd say as little as 6 oz of frothed milk would qualify it as a latte.) Although, I would have to say that Dick's drink sounds more like a hot chocolate.
Not necessarily. A patent is supposed to cover a unique way of accomplishing things. If the solution is an "obvious" solution, it's not supposed to be patentable.
The USPO is completely overwhelmed and doesn't do the research on patent applications that needs to be done. And technology has become some complex that it would probably be almost impossible for them to do so. So they grant patents knowing that in the end, these things will be worked out by the markets or by the courts.
And while it might not apply to this lawsuit, one of the major problems with the USPO today is that it has been giving patents for obvious ideas, not only implementations of those ideas. Amazon should NEVER have received a patent for "one-click" ordering, which Apple had to license from them. The storing of someone's personal data is an obvious business process. It's like saying that if I come up with a cool way of organizing physical files in a cabinet, I should receive a patent for that.
Whether or not it's overwhelmed or not isn't the point. The rules are in place. I did say unique, perhaps you didn't read it carefully enough.
There was no pool in the MPEG2 days; that's why to avoid this crap they made the pool of MPEGLA, though they disclaim that the pool may not be 100% and has no guarantee of patent lawsuits.
By the way, MPEG2 has nothing to do with H.264, so don't put them together.
MPEG-LA manages both the MPEG-2 and H.264 pools.
For example, the aforementioned zig-zag transform coefficient scanner
could apply to one or both formats. (Aside: I personally haven't studied such
since implementing a sweetly recursive Peano-Hilbert plane-filling curve scanner
courtesy Abraham Lempel a couple of decades ago...)
This case may not be a rerun of the AT&T ambush, which was settled,
but an unsettled matter of "essentiality".
Perhaps the zig-zag patent was deemed non-essential because it could
be done another way, slightly less efficiently per prior art. Perhaps
Apple's decoders allow for both, but chose the shinier one for more recent
encoding formats. It would be a shame if H.264 implementors just jammed
this in in a fixed way, rather than taking the approach of providing optionality,
such as is demonstrated by the use of CAVLC vs. CABAC to avoid IBM's
Comments
The way it works is that if you develop work that infringes, it infringes. That's all that matters. That's the point to patents. Knowledge of a patent doesn't matter. It's considered to be up to the person or company working on new products to do a patent search. It's then up to the patent holder to check out whatever seems to be infringing, and inform them.
no, you can't patent ideas, but if your product is close enough, then it infringes.
Not necessarily. A patent is supposed to cover a unique way of accomplishing things. If the solution is an "obvious" solution, it's not supposed to be patentable.
The USPO is completely overwhelmed and doesn't do the research on patent applications that needs to be done. And technology has become some complex that it would probably be almost impossible for them to do so. So they grant patents knowing that in the end, these things will be worked out by the markets or by the courts.
And while it might not apply to this lawsuit, one of the major problems with the USPO today is that it has been giving patents for obvious ideas, not only implementations of those ideas. Amazon should NEVER have received a patent for "one-click" ordering, which Apple had to license from them. The storing of someone's personal data is an obvious business process. It's like saying that if I come up with a cool way of organizing physical files in a cabinet, I should receive a patent for that.
Like taking a) melted chocolate and b) warmed milk and c) aerating the two to form a Latte.
C is an unique process that builds upon the existence of a) and b).
A latte is two shots of espresso, with 8-10 oz of frothed milk.
The machine that made espresso rightfully got a patent; you can't patent recipes.
I think a latte is more like pornography, there's no exact definition but I know one when I drink it. (Personally, I'd say as little as 6 oz of frothed milk would qualify it as a latte.) Although, I would have to say that Dick's drink sounds more like a hot chocolate.
Not necessarily. A patent is supposed to cover a unique way of accomplishing things. If the solution is an "obvious" solution, it's not supposed to be patentable.
The USPO is completely overwhelmed and doesn't do the research on patent applications that needs to be done. And technology has become some complex that it would probably be almost impossible for them to do so. So they grant patents knowing that in the end, these things will be worked out by the markets or by the courts.
And while it might not apply to this lawsuit, one of the major problems with the USPO today is that it has been giving patents for obvious ideas, not only implementations of those ideas. Amazon should NEVER have received a patent for "one-click" ordering, which Apple had to license from them. The storing of someone's personal data is an obvious business process. It's like saying that if I come up with a cool way of organizing physical files in a cabinet, I should receive a patent for that.
Whether or not it's overwhelmed or not isn't the point. The rules are in place. I did say unique, perhaps you didn't read it carefully enough.
There was no pool in the MPEG2 days; that's why to avoid this crap they made the pool of MPEGLA, though they disclaim that the pool may not be 100% and has no guarantee of patent lawsuits.
By the way, MPEG2 has nothing to do with H.264, so don't put them together.
MPEG-LA manages both the MPEG-2 and H.264 pools.
For example, the aforementioned zig-zag transform coefficient scanner
could apply to one or both formats. (Aside: I personally haven't studied such
since implementing a sweetly recursive Peano-Hilbert plane-filling curve scanner
courtesy Abraham Lempel a couple of decades ago...)
This case may not be a rerun of the AT&T ambush, which was settled,
but an unsettled matter of "essentiality".
Perhaps the zig-zag patent was deemed non-essential because it could
be done another way, slightly less efficiently per prior art. Perhaps
Apple's decoders allow for both, but chose the shinier one for more recent
encoding formats. It would be a shame if H.264 implementors just jammed
this in in a fixed way, rather than taking the approach of providing optionality,
such as is demonstrated by the use of CAVLC vs. CABAC to avoid IBM's
patented work on arithmetic coding.
According to this page: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/...Licensees.aspx Apple is a Licensee of those patents.
And According to this page: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/...Licensors.aspx Multimedia Patent Trust is a Licensor.
So how can they sue if they licensed the patents and Apple (and everyone else) paid for the use of that license?