Biden won’t save the Apple Watch from potential ban

No veto means ITC's patent infringement ruling stands.

See full article...

 

[0xdeadc0de]

Good for them, and good on the Biden administration for not being corrupt.

 

[Neonoggie]

I didnt even know the president had the right to veto this kind of decision from the ITC. TIL

 

[mknelson]

Ultimately the ban or lack thereof will come down to AliveCor's appeal of the Patent invalidations.

 

[luckydob]

Typical behavior of large corporations. Shoot first and ask questions later...Apple has enough money/time/lawyers to bully smaller firms around. Even in the end if they are found to have infringed, it will just be a rounding error with very little result on past/existing products. Apple wins even if they "lose".

 

[ChefJeff789]

I honestly initially assumed this was a patent troll situation, so bad on me. I'm glad to hear that a small company is getting seen and properly defended, especially as it seems there is plenty of circumstantial evidence suggesting that Apple either outright stole their design or at least saw it and said "hey, let's make essentially the same thing and then stop them from competing." What sucks is that the end result will likely not matter much to Apple. I just hope that the creators of the original tech get their due.

 

[evanTO]

Hey Scharon, there's a typo here:

Apple is also batting Masimo over the Apple Watch

I think you mean 'battling'.

 

[sunflower]

"it shared its ECG sensor technology with Apple in 2015 while building a business relationship."

They were building an add on to do ECG's. "Sharing" is implying a lot here.

"In 2018, Apple released the Apple Watch Series 4, which not only introduced an ECG sensor to the smartwatch but also blocked outside heart monitoring apps."

Do they single out ECG apps and ban them? Or, did they introduce security measures that make this difficult? The devil is in the details here.

It is telling that the US patent office invalidated the patents. Why did they do this?

There is not nearly enough information in this article to make a call for either entity.

 

[Ryan B.]

I fully expect that, if it looks like the Watch will actually be banned, Apple will swoop in with a truckload of cash and make the whole thing go away. Possibly even just buying AliveCor outright, if the owners can be convinced to sell (and everyone has a price).

I use tons of Apple products in my daily life. Watch, iPhone, iPad, MBP. As an iOS developer, I've hitched my livelihood to their wagon. But I'm not shedding any tears for Apple over this. It has so much cash on hand that it would scarcely notice the impact of settling this case.

 

[Glorified Desktop Support]

Da, comrade. Except that Apple’s corporate culture is one of the most conservative, risk-averse around. There is much more to this story.

Um, we are talking about the Apple that came up with an alert sound called "sosumi" ("So sue me") when in a legal battle over having computers do audio.

 

[elevate]

...after a January ruling found that Apple infringed on the Switzerland-headquartered company's pulse oximeter patent.

Masimo is headquartered in Irvine, California.

 

[TheShark]

As with almost all "on a computer" patents, this one spells out the easy / obvious part and leaves the hard part unspecified. To wit, claim 6 on the '731 patent:

6. The smart watch of claim 5, wherein to detect the presence of the arrhythmia, the processing device is further configured to input the motion sensor data with the HRV data into the machine learning algorithm trained to detect arrhythmias.

Getting the cardiac signal isolated from the noise and determining if it actually corresponds to an arrhythmia is the hard part. If your patent doesn't tell me how to do that then you haven't actually contributed anything. I'm pretty much left starting from scratch on producing a working product. Handwaving it away with "machine learning algorithm" or "an HRV signal analyzed in a time domain" isn't good enough for me. The whole point of the patent system is that the patent actually contributes knowledge in exchange for time-limited protection. But few if any of these patents actually spell out the hard part. You see this pretty much every single time. The patent office should require a working algorithm to be included for any claim like this. Patents are supposed to cover actual designs, not just ideas for designs. And these claims are nothing more than the most basic idea for a design.

 

[Resolute]

"it shared its ECG sensor technology with Apple in 2015 while building a business relationship."

They were building an add on to do ECG's. "Sharing" is implying a lot here.

"In 2018, Apple released the Apple Watch Series 4, which not only introduced an ECG sensor to the smartwatch but also blocked outside heart monitoring apps."

Do they single out ECG apps and ban them? Or, did they introduce security measures that make this difficult? The devil is in the details here.

It is telling that the US patent office invalidated the patents. Why did they do this?

There is not nearly enough information in this article to make a call for either entity.

Looks like the patent invalidations are based on claims of prior art.

This blog seems to do a good job laying much of it out. That writer's impression is that concurrent anti-trust claims are more likely to have impact than the patent claims. Particularly since Apple issued an update to the OS that blocked off third party trackers - lke Alivecor's - from functioning properly. That blogger suggests at the end that it is likely Alivecor will have to settle because Apple is running them out of money.

 

[Kanten]

Headline:

Biden won’t save the Apple Watch from potential ban​

Opening Paragraphs:


Kinda buried the lede there.

"Potential" and "unlikely" are not contradictory.

 

[Matthew J.]

Or, Apple could... I don't know. Actually manufacture the iWatch here? Then they wouldn't have to worry about ITC rulings and could deal with the patent case directly, in court.

After Apple tried to patent troll Android into oblivion, I have very little sympathy for them in patent cases anymore (not that this one appears to be a troll, but even if it was)...

 

[mrkite77]

Good. Apple had no qualms about seeking a ban on samsung.

 

[petersphilo]

My first instinct, when i glance at these kinds of headlines, is to think 'yet another Prenda-style patent troll trying to leech off of innovators'..
i'm glad i actually read the article, and found that Apple's behavior here seems egregious..

 

[Siosphere]

Apple's just a small company, they definitely couldn't afford a legal team to review their technology and make sure they weren't infringing on patents. They definitely didn't do it on purpose...

/s

 

[jhodge]

"it shared its ECG sensor technology with Apple in 2015 while building a business relationship."

They were building an add on to do ECG's. "Sharing" is implying a lot here.

"In 2018, Apple released the Apple Watch Series 4, which not only introduced an ECG sensor to the smartwatch but also blocked outside heart monitoring apps."

Do they single out ECG apps and ban them? Or, did they introduce security measures that make this difficult? The devil is in the details here.

It is telling that the US patent office invalidated the patents. Why did they do this?

There is not nearly enough information in this article to make a call for either entity.

Patents seem to be a real mess. My impression is that USPTO takes an “issue them all and let the courts sort it out” approach, which just leads to endless lawsuits and appeals until someone runs out of money. That impression may be incorrect, but that’s how it looks based on the reporting I’ve read here and in other tech-industry press.

 

[Zorro]

They will make a deal.

It is just about money.

 

[Hispalensis]

My instinct is to sympathize with the small company, but I am going to sit this one out until the courts rule on the patents themselves. A non-negligible fraction of patents I've seen willfully ignore prior art or overemphasize the uniqueness of their approach in order to get the patent through the examiner.

 

[GenocideOwl]

In 2018, Apple released the Apple Watch Series 4, which not only introduced an ECG sensor to the smartwatch but also blocked outside heart monitoring apps. AliveCor said this forced it in 2019 to stop selling KardiaBand, an ECG band that the company announced for Apple Watches in 2016.

MKBHD talked about companies doing this to smaller players, with his example being Apple and Tile, a year ago.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNAo0UdYF6g


All the big tech companies have a long history of doing things exactly like this. AKA they either buy up companies or "out compete" them with underhanded methods(surfacing results higher, selling at a loss, or just straight up making them incompatible like in this story).

These anti-competitive practices really should be put under the microscope by the government.

 

[foobarian]

I'd need to bother looking at the patents. If it's just "normal ECG, but now on a watch" then that's perhaps similar to the slew of stupid patents for unpatentable things that are patented because they're now "on the internet" that we've seen in the past. But it could easily be more interesting, something having to do with the design of the band or the hardware that makes it possible to do something you couldn't do before.

 

[KingPinLibtard]

I fully expect that, if it looks like the Watch will actually be banned, Apple will swoop in with a truckload of cash and make the whole thing go away. Possibly even just buying AliveCor outright, if the owners can be convinced to sell (and everyone has a price).

I use tons of Apple products in my daily life. Watch, iPhone, iPad, MBP. As an iOS developer, I've hitched my livelihood to their wagon. But I'm not shedding any tears for Apple over this. It has so much cash on hand that it would scarcely notice the impact of settling this case.

As a libtard, I am against both big business and wealthy founders.

So I struggle with understanding why what you describe would be a good outcome.

What makes you think that Apple wasn’t exploring ECG functionality built into the watch before AliveCor came along with an add-on?

What makes you think that AliveCor has something patentable?

 

[Uragan]

This is increasingly the problem with Ars. Those of us who might have worked at the companies involved, know the personalities, know the company culture from the inside, actually, like, know what they’re talking about, are downvoted by angry barrista-wanna-bes on their lunch break aPpLe iS tHe sAmE aS aLl tHe oThErs! Oh well.

Bitching about downvotes is a quick way to get more downvotes.

 

[Carewolf]

This is increasingly the problem with Ars. Those of us who might have worked at the companies involved, know the personalities, know the company culture from the inside, actually, like, know what they’re talking about, are downvoted by angry barrista-wanna-bes on their lunch break aPpLe iS tHe sAmE aS aLl tHe oThErs! Oh well.

You were downvoted because what you said is stupid. Even if they were "risk-averse", which they aren't really, they are just a big company. You can not protect against patents. Even if they invented the tech themselves, if another company publishes first, they end up having to pay royalties. The patents system is fundamentally broken that way.

 

[Rauth85]

As with almost all "on a computer" patents, this one spells out the easy / obvious part and leaves the hard part unspecified. To wit, claim 6 on the '731 patent:



Getting the cardiac signal isolated from the noise and determining if it actually corresponds to an arrhythmia is the hard part. If your patent doesn't tell me how to do that then you haven't actually contributed anything. I'm pretty much left starting from scratch on producing a working product. Handwaving it away with "machine learning algorithm" or "an HRV signal analyzed in a time domain" isn't good enough for me. The whole point of the patent system is that the patent actually contributes knowledge in exchange for time-limited protection. But few if any of these patents actually spell out the hard part. You see this pretty much every single time. The patent office should require a working algorithm to be included for any claim like this. Patents are supposed to cover actual designs, not just ideas for designs. And these claims are nothing more than the most basic idea for a design.

Reminds me of karl pilktertons "watch that tells you when you will die."

 

[jock2nerd]

I fully expect that, if it looks like the Watch will actually be banned, Apple will swoop in with a truckload of cash and make the whole thing go away. Possibly even just buying AliveCor outright, if the owners can be convinced to sell (and everyone has a price).

I use tons of Apple products in my daily life. Watch, iPhone, iPad, MBP. As an iOS developer, I've hitched my livelihood to their wagon. But I'm not shedding any tears for Apple over this. It has so much cash on hand that it would scarcely notice the impact of settling this case.

Or they could move manufacturing of the Apple Watch to the USA

ITC's ruling, in my limited understanding, affects the import of products, not USA manufacturing.

 

[Uragan]

You were downvoted because what you said is stupid. Even if they were "risk-averse", which they aren't really, they are just a big company. You can not protect against patents. Even if they invented the tech themselves, if another company publishes first, they end up having to pay royalties. The patents system is fundamentally broken that way.

It's not "fundamentally broken that way" though.

 

[Deleted member 174040]

This is increasingly the problem with Ars. Those of us who might have worked at the companies involved, know the personalities, know the company culture from the inside, actually, like, know what they’re talking about, are downvoted by angry barrista-wanna-bes on their lunch break aPpLe iS tHe sAmE aS aLl tHe oThErs! Oh well.

...by angry...who/whats??

 

[Carewolf]

Apple saw an interesting idea and either:

A) figured out their own implementation
or
B) reverse engineered the design and then duplicated it

If it's A, then the patent system worked as designed and no infringement happened. If it's B, isn't that still legal, as long as they weren't copying it exactly?

This would all be much simpler if being granted a patent came with the legal requirement that it be licensed to anyone who wants it. That way we could stop treating intelectual property like a cudgel and more like a way for people to be rewarded for ingenuity.

No in A) there is still infringement if their solution overlaps with the patented one. Self research/invention is not a protection against patent suits. You can even have invented it first, but if you are second in publishing, you still lose.