Someone who prefers to remain anonymous points out that the USPTO, in its infinite wisdom, has granted Microsoft a patent (7,617,530) on a method for "elevating" a user's rights temporarily. Basically, it's for a non-admin user who wants to do something (e.g., install a program) that requires admin access, without having to logout and re-login as the admin. As the submitter notes, this sounds like "sudo" or any number of other tools that have been around for ages. Can we submit the following xkcd comic as prior art/evidence of obviousness?
You may recall that Blackboard, an e-learning company, got itself a patent a while back that seemed to cover pretty much all e-learning -- and then went about suing others. After a lot of controversy, the company agreed not to sueopen source e-learning companies, but everyone else was fair game. The only problem? The patent was almost certainly ridiculous, and numerous thorough breakdowns of the patent raised serious questions about how it ever was approved in the first place. But, of course, the process of invalidating a patent is notoriously slow, and a company can cause lots of trouble in the meantime. In Blackboard's case, it went after competitor Desire2Learn.
Even as the Patent Office realized it needed to rethink the patent, the lawsuit moved forward, with Blackboard scoring a win. Of course, just weeks later, the USPTO gave an initial rejection of the patent. The original court ruling was (of course) appealed (separate from the USPTO ruling), and the good news is that the appeals court has dumped the entire patent. Only took a few years and millions of dollars wasted in legal fees for Desire2Learn. Too bad such money couldn't have gone towards actually improving e-learning. In the meantime, why doesn't anyone ask how such a patent got approved in the first place?
from the isn't-selling-equity-selling-equity? dept
Brad Feld, one of the increasing number of VCs who's grown skeptical of the value of patents (software patents in particular) alerts us that domain registrar GoDaddy has apparently applied for a patent on selling shares of equity in a domain name. You can see the application itself, which only has six claims and seems pretty straightforward. It's only an application, so there's still a decent chance this gets rejected -- but the very fact that anyone even thought it was worth applying for such a patent is quite telling. It's difficult to see what is new or unique about what's in the patent, other than it applies the standard process of selling equity in anything to a domain name.
Lawyer Raymond Niro, for whom the term "patent troll" was apparently first coined, has been known to use the fact that he represents a company called Global Patent Holdings (GPH) to his advantage. GPH owns patent 5,253,341, but looking at it there won't do much good. You see, Niro and others claimed that the patent covered pretty much anyone running a web server, leading to quite a few legal battles, including one against a guy, Greg Aharonian, who called it a "bad patent." For claiming that, he got sued for patent infringement. In fighting the patent, it was re-examined, and all 16 of its claims were rejected... but a 17th claim was added and allowed to stand.
Since then the patent has been asserted against a wide range of organizations, including some resort in Florida and the Green Bay Packers. Niro appears to claim that any site using a JPEG image violates the patent. Not only that, but in cases where the patent has been asserted, Niro has been known to go for something of a sympathy play, by noting that the inventors (or the widow of one inventor) named on the patent are "old and feeble" (yes, they called them feeble) and made almost no money in 2006 (even though the filing was in 2008 -- some noted that their 2007 income was conveniently left out).
With so many cases involving this patent underway, the USPTO agreed to re-examine the one claim (claim 17). And, with that re-exam going on, a judge on one of the cases put the case on hold until the re-exam is done. While GPH protested, claiming that the patent had already been re-examined (and that the re-exam process took too long), the judge pointed out that there's only one claim left (so it should be faster) and that this particular claim had never been re-examined, since it was added during the last re-exam.
Last summer, the USPTO gave an initial (non-final) rejection of the patent, in rather strong language. Not surprisingly, GPH/Niro have pushed back, but in early June the USPTO appears to have smacked down the patent all over again in this rather lengthy ruling, which you can see below:
The smackdown here is rather complete. On top of reaffirming the 19 reasons for rejecting the remaining claim, the examiner added more reasons to reject it for being obvious and anticipated by other inventions. Also, it appears that GPH/Niro tried to do something similar to last time, in that they also submitted some new claims to be added (claims 18 - 21), but the examiner smacked those down as well, as attempts to "broaden the scope" of the patent. On top of that, the rejects scolds GPH/Niro for mischaracterizing what the patent office has said and even using a "biased" expert witness with "flip-flopping declarations."
This is, still, a non-final rejections, but it doesn't look like GPH/Niro has been able to make up any ground at all on this particular fight, and, in fact, seems to be getting pushed further and further back with each try. This particular patent expires in March of 2011 anyway, so unless Niro is able to pull a proverbial rabbit out of the hat to convince the USPTO that this patent is vaild, it's not looking very good.
theodp writes "A just-published IBM patent application for Optimizing Utilization of a Donor describes how to monitor 'the somatic (i.e. physical) and affective (i.e. emotional) states of human resources' to determine 'an optimal allocation of the human resources to tasks.' IBM further explains that 'the emotional and physical states may be sensed via non-invasive biosensors.' And what exactly will be measured and sensed? Physical condition can be determined by measuring 'the level of blood sugar, the blood heat, or the like.' And clues to 'a human resource's mood to perform a job with lust, joy or any other emotional condition' can be found by looking at 'changes in autonomic functions, such as, for example, heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, sweating, trembling, and other features like hormonal changes; changes in body temperature; and changes in neural function that are measurable.' So if you want that job with Big Blue, perhaps you better make sure that your Blood Pressure, Pulse, Mood, and Level of Fatigue are as up-to-snuff as your skills. Yikes."
This sounds like the modern equivalent of Taylorism, which never faired all that well in the first place. Effectively, this sounds like simply applying modern technologies to a typical Taylor-like review of a worker.
Okay, so this story is bizarre enough by itself, but there's an odd twist at the end. A husband and wife who held four separate winning lottery tickets claims to have figured out a secret formula for winning the lottery. That seems highly unlikely, of course. There is no formula that can predict totally independent numbers. The four winning tickets all used the same numbers, so there's no proof that the couple did anything other than get lucky by having the same number they played four different times hit.
However, their lawyer is claiming that the couple is "exploring patent protection." Want to see a sign of how ridiculous the patent situation has become? If you had figured out the (non-existent) secret to winning the lottery, would you use it to (a) keep winning the lottery or (b) patent it? It's only in these bizarre times that a couple would even think that (b) would be the more profitable option. Of course, if there really were some secret to predicting independent numbers that the couple had figured out, wouldn't you think that any lottery commission would immediately change how their lottery worked the second that patent was published?
The infamous and questionable JPEG patent held by Global Patent Holdings (GPH) and used to threaten just about anyone online (including the Green Bay Packers, CDW, a resort in Florida and others) who happened to have a JPEG on their website has been put on hold for a while. While the folks behind it somehow got Forbes to write a puff piece making it sound like the patent holder was the victim, if you look at the details, it was clear that this was an abuse of the patent system. It was a questionable patent from the beginning, and an earlier review of the patent had every claim thrown out. However, during that process, the patent holder tried adding a ton of other claims -- one of which the USPTO actually allowed to go through. It's that single remaining claim that's being used to sue lots of folks. However, with the USPTO recently agreeing to re-examine that one claim, those being sued have asked the court to put all of the cases on hold until the re-exam is done. As we've pointed out, all too often, judges refuse to wait for the Patent Office to re-examine a patent -- which is a big problem, since so many re-exams result in rejected claims.
However, that's not the case here. Last week, the judge ruled that it made sense to stay the case until the re-exam was complete. GPH protested this move, noting that the patent had already been re-examined before, and that process took many years during which GPH couldn't enforce the patent. However, the court reasonably responded on a few different points. First, it noted that while the length of the re-exam last time was quite long, with only one claim it shouldn't take as long this time. Second, it pointed out that while it's true the patent was re-examined once before, since this claim is a new claim, it was not re-examined -- only examined. Finally, and most importantly, the court noted that if the courts had not waited, a bad decision likely would have resulted, as they would have had to assume the later rejected claims were valid.
"a significant
amount of time and effort in claim construction and other litigation would have been
wasted if we had forged ahead without the benefit of the PTO’s examination (and
subsequent rejection) of those claims."
This should, effectively, keep GPH from filing any more suits on this patent until the USPTO has a chance to review the remaining claim. While other lawsuits can be filed, a quick pointer to this ruling should hopefully keep those cases from going anywhere until the USPTO has reviewed the patent. Oh, and by the way, the judge appears to not have been even remotely swayed by the totally unrelated fact that the original inventors of the patent were old and feeble, which GPH had used in trying to get a sympathy vote. It was so inconsequential the judge doesn't even mention it in the ruling.
One of the more annoying things in patent lawsuits is watching the USPTO reject patents soon after a lawsuit concludes -- and having the judges in those lawsuits refuse to wait for the USPTO to weigh in. This is especially troublesome considering that so many patent re-exams result in rejected claims. It would only make sense for judges to wait until the Patent Office has had a chance to review the patent. As if to highlight that, late last week, the USPTO rejected all claims on a rather infamous "e-learning" patent held by Blackboard Inc. This comes just slightly over a month after Blackboard won a lawsuit using that very patent. It was known during the trial that the Patent Office had agreed to review it, but apparently, the judge didn't want to wait.
Of course, Blackboard quickly came out with a statement saying this doesn't matter, it's already won the case, and it still expects an injunction to be issued preventing Desire2Learn from offering e-learning software. Blackboard is correct that this is just an initial rejection (meaning there are still responses and additional rounds to go), but it still seems rather weak to put out a statement saying that everyone should just ignore the rather significant questions the USPTO has just raised about the patent in question.
theodp writes "Most corporations would be delighted to have their patent application assigned to the USPTO's Mark Fadok. After all, this is the Primary Examiner who didn't stop Amazon from patenting Blurbs or block Microsoft from patenting the Wish List. But Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' 1-Click Patent - which Fadok has been rejecting since 2002 - is another matter. Why? Just about everything about it was 'old and well known' at the time of the invention, argued Fadok in a letter sent to Amazon last week explaining why he was once again rejecting the patent claims. This latest action comes after a three-judge USPTO panel convened at 'patent reformer' Amazon's request, overruled Fadok's earlier objections to 1-Click in September."
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