US ITC May Reverse Judge's Ruling In Kodak vs. Apple 101
An anonymous reader writes "Going after Apple and RIM, Kodak says, 'every digital camera and phone with a camera' infringes on its patents. A judge sided against Kodak in January, but now the US International Trade Commission has agreed to review the judge's decision. With the ITC's ability to block imports, Apple and RIM may have no choice but to fork over dough to Kodak in the event of an unfavorable decision. If the ITC can toss out court decisions like this, one wonders how much hope there is for patent reform. The patent in question is Patent Number 6292218: 'Electronic camera for initiating capture of still images while previewing motion images.'"
Re:Uh... Exactly HOW can they "throw out"... (Score:2, Insightful)
...the Judge's decision. I thought only an Appeals Court can do that, not an AGENCY of the Administration.
In today's America jurisdictions and authority seem to be dynamically defined ... once again IT methodology has creeped beyond its scope.
Re:Uh... Exactly HOW can they "throw out"... (Score:1, Insightful)
We "throw out" the Constitution YEARS ago.... that is how.
Clueless reporting (Score:4, Insightful)
And of course Kodak can ask the ITC to reconsider its decision. So they will look at the exact same evidence again. Now I don't know what the rules are for a decision of the ITC, but in a court judgement the ruling would only be changed if the first judge had made blatant errors. I'd think that is unlikely to happen.
Re:Uh... Exactly HOW can they "throw out"... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about prior art? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What about prior art? (Score:2, Insightful)
How does making it a single integrated circuit pass the obviousness test?
Personally, and patent that is just another, prior, patent where the words "on or with a [computer|network|integrated circuit]" tacked on the end should be thrown out as obvious, because that doesn't fulfill the original purposes of the patent system but these days I guess that's just me.
Re:What about prior art? (Score:5, Insightful)
Odd. I always thought that a specific process done by specific hardware qualified as a patent. But since you obviously have no interest in expounding on your claims I guess there isn't much to discuss.
You have always thought wrong then. Just because a specific process is done on new hardware doesn't mean it's not *still the same process*. If that were the case, then you could say since I have this piece of software that runs on ARM and the same software that runs on x86, there should be two different patents. That's not the case, otherwise Java and any interpreted language would have a major problem.
The problem with Kodak's patent in this particular instance is almost every part of the patent has prior art. There may be a couple line items that don't have prior art, but you can't patent a multi-line patent based off of only one or two changes... because again, I could twiddle a few things in how an iPhone works and then start selling an iPhone. Apple would probably have a problem with this.
A patent has to be *significantly* new/different to be a new patent. In Kodaks case with this patent, it's not significantly new or different than existing products.
Why patents are bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Thinking about this case made me realize why patents are a bad idea. And the problem with patents have to do with the scarcity of invention ... or lack of thereof.
Patents give inventors monopoly over their invention, even if other people come up with the same idea independently.
One of the main assumptions justifying this is that invention is scarce. Coming up with an invention requires either a rare original idea which is hard to come by, some special insight that only few brilliant people would have, or a tremendous amount of effort that only few would be willing to spend on developing such an invention.
If inventions are indeed rare, then the benefit of encouraging innovation by giving such monopolistic power to the inventor, and making it safe for the inventor to publish the invention and license it to others is greater than the damage caused by such monopoly. If invention is easy to come by, on the other hand, such monopolistic power stifles innovation rather than foster it.
If you look at most patents, even the better ones, where there is no issue of prior art, most of them are solutions that are easy to come by. They may not be immediately obvious, but if you take any reasonably experienced engineer and give him a few months to work on this problem, they would come up with a solution, and probably a similar solution. With thousands of qualified engineers in each area and hundreds of companies that benefit from such inventions, it no longer makes sense to protect them with patents.
Patentable inventions are supposed to be "non-obvious", but this doesn't solve the problem. Even if the USPTO made a better job of filtering out obvious inventions (more than the lousy job they're doing right now), we'll still have all these patents where the solution is not immediately obvious but are the kind of invention that any qualified engineer could come by. And because this is true for most inventions, and because there is no clear criteria for distinguishing between the true "high quality" and the lower quality patents, I think we are better off by eliminating patents in most areas altogether.