
Apple found guilty of willful patent infringement - vaksel
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/04/apple-found-guilty-of-willful-patent-infringement.ars
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alain94040
That's a tough one to decide. I read the patent quickly. I know quite a bit
about PCI, cache coherency and prediction.

I'd say whoever wrote the patent covered a good idea. Good enough to be
patentable? Hum... It's clever. Not completely obvious. But not earth
shattering either...

If Apple couldn't find any prior art, meaning the patent authors were truly
the first ones to come with this, then I'd have to side with them and say that
yes, it's patentable.

I'm just surprised because there were millions of academic and research papers
on such topics. No one described this before or even mentioned it in passing?

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tdavis
I'm not sure there is such a thing as _not_ "good enough to be patentable".
There is a patent for de-boning a turkey, for god sakes. Oh, and a related
patent for a "method of removing meat from a bone". We ran into our own patent
issue when we managed to duplicate the functionality of a partner's (pending)
patent in a week. The wording is so vague that every site remotely like ours
would be in violation, were it ever actually accepted, which I doubt it will
be.

In short, I have lost all respect for patenting in general and believe it
should be abolished entirely.

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axod
Agreed. I'm sure everyone on hacker news who has done anything has violated
some patent in existence somewhere. The quicker we can abolish the whole
system, the better. I don't think it's helpful for anyone.

The award of $19m is also pretty ridiculous for something so trivial.

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jrockway
_The award of $19m is also pretty ridiculous for something so trivial._

Yeah, but they _willfully_ used a good idea to make money. We should penalize
companies that apply good ideas to bring products to market. Don't want any of
that...

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axod
Just goes to show that ideas aren't worthless, assuming you have the money to
file a patent and sue someone who executed on the idea.

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zacharypinter
I'm a little torn on this.

On the one hand, I think the patents are abused and it's ridiculous that a
company or individual has to look up everything they think of in isolation in
order to avoid getting sued.

On the other hand, Apple is known for being a bully with patents, and it's
rather satisfying to see them feel the pain a little bit.

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axod
How about any judge who passes judgement on things like this, has to learn to
program just a little bit. Just so they can understand how trivial some things
are, compared with others.

It does sound like the original patent was bogus. How can you patent something
so obvious and trivial as this? If you can sum up the idea in pretty much a
single sentence as you can here, should raise a few flags.

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djahng
I agree with you in that the judge and jury probably didn't understand the
first thing about patent at all. Unfortunately that's not what the lawsuit was
about. It was that Apple was aware of the patent and infringed upon it
anyways. I think the patent process needs some major reform. After all, Apple
is trying to (or did by now?) patent the pinch. And then there's the person
who patented the use of a laser pointer to play with a cat...

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lutorm
OMG, that is actually a patent. I thought you were joking.

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russell
This was from East Texas where there is no such thing as a bad patent and
there is no jury award too big. Note that the two companies are within a few
miles of each other and the case could have been tried in SF Federal Court,
but then the SF court might have taken a reasoned approach to the case. I hope
Apple appeals.

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stcredzero
You can think of the Industrial Revolution as the birth of a new kind of
society and culture -- one that collectively understands and effectively
leverages machines.

I suspect that we are in the midst of another deep change. We are seeing the
emergence of a society that understands and effectively leverages Networks and
Computation. Also, just as the Industrial Revolution was accompanied by deep
changes in economics. I think that understanding this will be key. What is the
21st century equivalent of mass production and economies of scale?

I also suspect that all of this is deeply tied to our understanding of
_Intellectual Property_.

