The Web’s longest nightmare ends: Eolas patents are dead on appeal

Web pioneers united to stop "interactive web" patents at an East Texas trial.

Read the whole story

 

[siliconaddict]

I've never actually met anyone from the USPO before. I'm wondering if its because I've never met anyone there, or because they fear getting their asses kicked by people in the tech industry?

 

[LuDux]

So, what recourse do previous settlers have to recoup their payments?

 

[eksith]

@siliconaddict I seriously doubt the vast majority of them are even aware how much vitriol the tech sphere is launching at the moment.

And to be fair, why should they? Their job is to be objective as much as possible in finding prior art themselves, but the deliberate obfuscation of text isn't helpful. You have to understand that these aren't programmers themselves and it's fairly easy to pass rubbish as fact. There are countermeasures to this and it requires the participation of the tech community en masse.

Also of note, this may be the first time the USPTO has received this much scrutiny since its inception.

There needs to be expert overhaul in the USPTO or this may just be a small victory. I don't see why anyone anywhere would want to setup tech businesses in the U.S. if it involves fighting this nonsense. Patent trolls are a grave threat to progress in the tech sector.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

How did such a seemingly overbroad and overblown patent claim manage to survive so very long in the face of all that scrutiny?

 

[ApproximateIdentity]

It's pretty depressing that people needed to testify about prior art when this should never have been granted and barring that should have later been thrown out purely on grounds of obviousness (I'm not saying that obviousness didn't play a roll, but in any rational system, this case would have been decided on those grounds alone). What does it take for something to be considered obvious?

 

[Plasdom]

Rather disappointing that an institution of higher learning like UC is involved in this.

 

[BWinmill]

I'm not going to comment on the legitimacy of the patent, because this is one of those cases which is so emotionally loaded that it would be impossible to come to a reasonable conclusion on that issue.

However, this is one of those cases where the value of the patent to society is so great that it is wrong to assign the rights to any person or body. That would be true even if the patent was legitimate. It not unheard of for courts to recognize this and make dubious legal decisions to recognize the greater public good. This is arguably what happened in Honeywell vs. Sperry Rand over the computer. Sperry Rand's patents were invalidated, using the Antanasoff-Berry Computer as a form of prior art. (The ruling was dubious because the ABC computer was a primitive and unlikely candidate for the patent, but was close enough for legal arguments to be fudged.) The industry was thus freed or patent litigation on this front in order to facilitate a more rapid expansion.

 

[TheGreenMonkey]

eksith[/url]":1gznzy2d]@siliconaddict I seriously doubt the vast majority of them are even aware how much vitriol the tech sphere is launching at the moment.

And to be fair, why should they? Their job is to be objective as much as possible in finding prior art themselves, but the deliberate obfuscation of text isn't helpful. You have to understand that these aren't programmers themselves and it's fairly easy to pass rubbish as fact. There are countermeasures to this and it requires the participation of the tech community en masse.

Also of note, this may be the first time the USPTO has received this much scrutiny since its inception.

There needs to be expert overhaul in the USPTO or this may just be a small victory. I don't see why anyone anywhere would want to setup tech businesses in the U.S. if it involves fighting this nonsense. Patent trolls are a grave threat to progress in the tech sector.

With the current climate of patent trollism, and even copyright trollism to some extent, it's a wonder that anyone would want to be a tech company startup in the US.

As for being objective in their decisions, it's all well and good, but what is really needed are experts and researchers that can examine patents fully for the bs they seem to be filled with and deny them outright if they find anything that resembles obfuscation and state the reasons why. Then make the person/entity applying for the patent appeal that decision with all the materials they need to back up their claims of originality, non-prior art, non-software, non-business method so that the application can truly be decided as worthy of patent protection.

I think that alone would help alleviate some of the bogus patents that we've seen of late. Put the onus on the patent applicant to prove that their idea is novel.

 

[Brandon B]

This seems like a good place to leave this story about crowdsourced patent reform program AskPatents:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2013/07/22.html

 

[Krutawn]

Software, or any idea for that matter, should not ever receive a patent.

 

[Tsa Szymborska]

I miss the most important info in the article. So what did Berners-Lee testify? Who was the judge? What was the verdict? Can there be an appeal? Will Doyle go to jail? What did the University of California have to say about this?

 

[Yuhong bao]

On Eolas and Internet Explorer, remember click to activate?

 

[mhall1]

LuDux[/url]":38qkzbx4]So, what recourse do previous settlers have to recoup their payments?

None. They made a choice to forego the possibility of prevailing in court in favour of a less-risky settlement.

 

[theotherjim]

Kudos to Google, Yahoo, and JCP for staying the course. In the end it is the only way to defeat the trolls. Not the cheapest way, just the only way.

 

[lXilEl]

Good riddance!

 

[jimjimjimjimjim]

Now if we could only end the rest of it...

 

[joemullin]

Tsa Szymborska[/url]":3vr3at9b]I miss the most important info in the article. So what did Berners-Lee testify? Who was the judge? What was the verdict? Can there be an appeal? Will Doyle go to jail? What did the University of California have to say about this?

Bear in mind this is an article about the appeal decision. It's actually kind of long considering the only "news" is an essentially a one-word opinion ("affirmed").

If you want a more detailed story, that came out at the trial level—those stories are linked in the piece, or you can read the whole 4-part series.

Regarding further appeal, all they can do is ask for an en banc hearing of the full Federal Circuit, or send a petition to the Supreme Court. I would be absolutely stunned if either route succeeded in this case. They may try, though, simply because of the staggering amount of money that the Eolas machine produced.

 

[Autoflip]

Wheels Of Confusion[/url]":2go7ql4r]How did such a seemingly overbroad and overblown patent claim manage to survive so very long in the face of all that scrutiny?

Texas fascinates me quite a lot. From what I read, it just seems similar to the island in Lost, there's some gravito-magneto-geological anomaly that just fcks with the constants of the laws of physics. And also, guns, murica, patents and wackos.

Seriously, I'm curious and would gladly move there for a year or so! My non-threatening left-wing french canadian parents really enjoyed it a lot, even if they are basically bizarro world texans!

 

[Zarsus]

At the same time, the University of California, and the Berkeley campus in particular, was a key institution in creating early web technology. While UC lawyers cooperated with the plaintiffs, two UC Berkeley-trained computer scientists were key witnesses in the effort to demolish the Eolas patents.

I sure hope these two scientists don't suffer any unfortunate consequences for blocking UC's money making scheme.

 

[ITawAPuttyTat]

Score one for the creators, the ones who do all the work and take all the risk, over the freeloading nut-danglers, the ones who shamelessly try to elbow in on the success of others.

Corporate America needs to adopt this creed: Settling feeds the troll. Fighting kills the troll. Kill the troll.

 

[passivesmoking]

BWinmill[/url]":35989put]I'm not going to comment on the legitimacy of the patent, because this is one of those cases which is so emotionally loaded that it would be impossible to come to a reasonable conclusion on that issue.

However, this is one of those cases where the value of the patent to society is so great that it is wrong to assign the rights to any person or body. That would be true even if the patent was legitimate. It not unheard of for courts to recognize this and make dubious legal decisions to recognize the greater public good. This is arguably what happened in Honeywell vs. Sperry Rand over the computer. Sperry Rand's patents were invalidated, using the Antanasoff-Berry Computer as a form of prior art. (The ruling was dubious because the ABC computer was a primitive and unlikely candidate for the patent, but was close enough for legal arguments to be fudged.) The industry was thus freed or patent litigation on this front in order to facilitate a more rapid expansion.

There are numerous machines that preceded ENIAC. Zuse Z3, Colossus, Harvard Mk 1, theoretical and unbuilt machines such as the Universal Turing Machine and the Analytical Engine, and so on.

 

[passivesmoking]

In Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the planet of Golgafrinchen had a society split into basically 3 groups. The great thinkers (Political leaders, philosophers, inverters, architects, artists, poets, etc), the great doers (Builders, engineers, farmers, miners, factory workers, etc), and the middle men (telephone sanitisers, hair dressers, tired TV producers, lawyers, insurance salesmen, what have you). They got rid of their useless third of society by conning them all into abandoning the planet on the B-ark with spurious tales of impending doom involving a mutant star goat. They then went on to live happy, fulfilling, productive lives. Until they were all wiped out by a plague contracted from an unsanitary telephone.

Can't we build a B ark for the USPTO? Given the patents they approve they're obviously gullible enough to believe anything, including the idea of the Earth being destroyed by a mutant star goat. We could even patent the B-ark first. Its not like they'd bother to check for prior art or anything.

 

[duncansil]

Wheels Of Confusion[/url]":2tmqf44n]How did such a seemingly overbroad and overblown patent claim manage to survive so very long in the face of all that scrutiny?

Technology clueless juries.

 

[pyu]

As a programmer, I don't regard software to be patentable since they are essentially expressions/writing/compositions which communicate to a general purpose computing device to perform a series of task.

If anything, most of the protections which software producers want for their products are achievable and should be achieved through copyright.

In this scenario, legislators should recognise that patents only have the effect of creating economic rents.

The faster we recognise this fact the sooner we can eradicate patent trolls.

 

[eksith]

jameskatt2[/url]":1a0lpm5z]Now is the time for the judge involved to give Doyle and his Eolas lawyers the death penalty for harming society.

This is hyperbole, surely?

This kind of thing trivializes the more heinous crimes happening in society today. At the worst, he should be paying restitution to those companies he's sued with his non-practicing entity. People like him are a drain on resources and innovation, but let's not jump the gun just yet.

 

[USMA56795]

sumguy[/url]":1wihu2ec]There are over 6000 patent examiners. In general, you never hear about the quality work that we do.

Prior art is published information before the application filing date. You may think that it is obvious, but without proof it is just a feeling. The laws and practices have changed greatly since this was first issued. What were you doing in 1994?

I will not be following up.

It's your job to find that prior art, which is published. When you fail to do so, we get a multi-billion dollar patent trolling problem, which we pay for. Meanwhile, for every lousy patent you grant, your department gets a bigger budget.

 

[Bearologist]

LuDux[/url]"dp9hgqv]So, what recourse do previous settlers have to recoup their payments?

If they settled, I believe they have no recourse at all. If they were ordered to pay, there could conceivably be something, but they'd likely just get nothing since I doubt Eolas is anything but a shell for Doyle to hide behind.

 

[DriverGuru]

Wait, did I read this right? An IP case heard in an East Texas court was decided correctly?

 

[zladuric]

Like Joel said, "...The other 40,000-odd software patents issued every year are mostly garbage that any working programmer could “invent” three times before breakfast...."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2013/07/22.html

Edit: uh, seems like this link was quoted several times already in the article.

 

[Bondi Surfer]

Patent trolling is a lot like shearing a pig - a whole lot of squealing and fuck all wool

 

[HydrogenAlpha]

Bondi Surfer[/url]":xx8psnny]Patent trolling is a lot like shearing a pig - a whole lot of squealing and fuck all wool

I don't think you were paying attention. 100s of millions of dollars is a lot of wool. That's the problem.

 

[pyu]

zladuric[/url]":24v1hlqt]IMO, Richard Stallman has it right. If we just delete all patents and the patent office, then all knowledge would be "free".

Then, of course, nobody would have great incentive to do any R&D, so without patents, we would have to go back to the middle ages never to come to this post-industry era. Oh wait...

My head aches every time I see arguments rationalising the existence of any particular set of laws, in this case the patent system. For instance, the oft-stated "good" of the patent system empowering individual inventors and driving innovation - in almost every case since the dawn of the industrial revolution, broad steps forward in terms of technological advancement has always been the result of willing capital tied to human ingenuity. I highly doubt that even 20% of patents actually saw the light of day in reality as actual products.

Just like that there has been artists / musicians / writers for almost a century before the introduction of modern copyright systems, I don't think research and development for companies, organisations and individuals would suddenly evaporate because there is no patent system.

Let's admit it, the only thing that patents have done is probably to bring some form of order and ritual to the intense competition between innovators and their capitalist backers. Without such a system, rather than a legal department, industrial/corporate espionage would probably be more open, widespread and brutal, ala, Game of Thrones.

 

[bug77]

Wheels Of Confusion[/url]":3u3nf6uq]How did such a seemingly overbroad and overblown patent claim manage to survive so very long in the face of all that scrutiny?

*cough* rectangle phone/tablet with "minimalist" design *cough*

 

[strohminator]

siliconaddict[/url]":2ncflxf0]I've never actually met anyone from the USPO before. I'm wondering if its because I've never met anyone there, or because they fear getting their asses kicked by people in the tech industry?

One of my friends used to work at the patent office. Here are a few reasons that messed up patents get granted. None of these excuse patents like this one, but it's the reality:
* Patent examiners are given a lot of patents to examine and not that much time. If they spend a lot of time digging into prior art for one patent, they basically have to speed through a few others.
* Patent applications are written in a bizarre legalese that makes them almost impossible to understand.
* Appeals are, in his opinion, the #1 reason bad patents exist. Many patents are shut down the first time, but the applicant can appeal endlessly. Eventually, they'll find someone who will grant their patent.
* It's not an adversarial process. Both the applicant and the examiner start from the premise that there is a decent invention. If every patent application featured someone arguing that the invention is not novel, useful, or non-obvious, there would be far fewer patents granted.