Little-known intellectual property agency IP Innovation LLC and its parent Technology Licensing Corporation this week became the latest to claim that Apple had abused a patent they hold. Filed April 18th in a US district court in Marshall, Texas the four-page formal complaint purports that Apple has engaged in 'willful and deliberate' infringement of a computer control patent by selling its current Tiger operating system. On a related note, Microsoft has similar problems.
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Member since:2005-11-10
"People seem to think that by posting in threads and agreeing with other people they are changing the world. They are not. They are posting in threads online. The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. Being outraged online is a form of entertainment, and refreshing a thread to receive a hit of consensus packs the thrill of genuine activism without requiring any sweat."
Tycho, penny-arcade
If you are an American, and you want this to stop, write to your local congressman, now.
Member since:2006-04-05
Suffice to say, I am not. But I happen to be affected by it because I'm part of the wrong side of the industry; namely, I'm a computer scientist (BD) and I could well eventually be hired by startups, big companies, or anything in-between. So you see, "all-american" patent trolls will eventually affect me in a way or another. And I'm not alone; see how fast the IT industry is growing in India, China, the whole South America, and the Eastern Europe. We might not be able to sell, in the U.S., products we develop, if they happen to infringe on some obviety the USPTO considered innovative and granted exclusive licensing rights to some random patent troll.
Sorry if I happen to care about the USPTO situation, but if that makes you feel better, quite frankly, I'm also covering my own ass.
Edit: grammar. And there are probably a handful of errors left. It should be pretty obvious by now I'm NOT a native speaker.
Edited 2007-04-22 18:59
Member since:2006-01-16
USPTO, shame on yout! You completely, *completely* lost the very notion of what innovation is!
From m-w.com:
innovate: "1 : to introduce as or as if new"
There's a reason market-droids don't like to talk about invention anymore; they aren't interested in actually creating new inventions. They introduce old crap with shiny new labels, and call it innovation.
The USPTO ideally has no interest in innovation. Patents protect inventions, which are much less common than the innovations that marketing people crap out all day. Unfortunately, it seems that the patent "inspectors" are quite bedazzled by innovations, and are more than happy to grant an insanely long monopoly on whatever shiny thing happens to cross their desks.
Member since:
2006-04-05
So, the window is a metaphore for the paper. We can stack them, move them, take them out of sight, reprint (resize, eh) stuff on smaller/larger sheets...
And we *never* classified paper (or, by extension, windows on a GUI) using tabs before, right? And *absolutely no one* would ever think about that, so it's gotta be innovation, gotta be patenteable, right??
Hello?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_folder
There are even pretty pictures on that entry for those who can't get a clue even after severe spanking by The Cluestick(TM).
USPTO, shame on yout! You completely, *completely* lost the very notion of what innovation is!
The suit against MS is just as preposterous as the Kodak one against Sun. The USPTO is granting patents on paradigms, for Divinity's sake.
This has got to stop.