Thursday, 30 August 2012

Apple-Samsung patent fight

The average smartphone may arguably infringe as many as 250,000 patents. A jury award of $1.05 billion vastly overstates the real worth of each patent.

 

Late last week, a San Jose jury awarded Apple Inc. $1.05 billion in damages for patent infringement, a huge win for Apple in its worldwide patent fight with smartphone manufacturers that, like Samsung, sell devices equipped with Google's Android operating system.
The award, the third largest in the history of U.S. patent litigation, will likely cruise into first place next month when U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh decides what additional amount Apple should receive from Samsung based on the jury's finding that much of the infringement was "willful."
But even without that enhancement, which could add another $2 billion to Samsung's tab, the jury's $1 billion-plus verdict breaks down to just under $48 for each of the roughly 22 million infringing phones sold by Samsung. To the jury, 50 bucks per phone must have sounded like a reasonable figure, and it may well to you too.
But it's not — it's way too high — and here's why: The average smartphone may arguably infringe as many as 250,000 patents, not to mention myriad copyrights and other design-related intellectual property. (Companies don't sift through every patent coming out of Washington before engineering and releasing a product; they create devices and battle claims as necessary.)
If you were to divide the average retail price of a smartphone — about $400 — by those 250,000 potentially applicable patents, you'd find that each one would account for just $0.0016 of the phone's value. And, in reality, even that's too much, once you factor in the costs of raw materials, labor, transportation and marketing, which also contribute to a phone's value.
Yet for infringing just a handful of Apple's patents, Samsung faces a minimum payment of $48 per phone, a shocking 30,000 times the average per patent value. Put another way, if the owners of all the 250,000 inventions that might be present in Samsung smartphones were awarded damages at the same level as Apple, Samsung would have to charge a ludicrous $2 million per phone just to break even.
But wait, you say, the San Jose jury no doubt included some level of punishment in its award, in order to "send a message." But, by law, patent damages are meant to compensate not punish, as the jury was expressly instructed.
Or maybe Apple's patents are worth far more than average intellectual property and are therefore deserving of a higher rate? Perhaps so. But thousands of times more valuable?
For that matter, why shouldn't we also entertain the possibility that Apple's patents are actually worth less than the average? It may sound blasphemous to question the value of intellectual property owned by the world's most valuable company, but consider this: When purchasing a phone are you willing to pay more for rounded corners and stylish icons or for the device's ability to transmit data to a cell tower? In the smartphone wars, Apple is primarily enforcing patents on the former, Samsung and Motorola on the latter.
Surprisingly, Apple is well aware of arguments about the real worth of each patent per phone: "In a world where a device can be made up of thousands of patented components, patent infringement damages should be proportionate to the value of the component in question rather than the entire product." That's a 2008 quote from the Coalition for Patent Fairness, an advocacy group formed by Apple and other tech companies frequently sued for patent infringement.
Indeed, Apple makes this same point in some form or fashion dozens of times a year when playing defense against patent suits filed by other, much smaller patent owners. Over the last five years, no company has been sued more times for infringement than Apple. When the shoe was on the other foot, however, it was content to check its patent law principles at the courtroom door: It actually asked for far more than it received, about $2.5 billion total in "compensatory" damages.
So, Apple, congratulations on your large award. Next time you're accused of patent infringement by a start-up, an individual inventor or a dreaded "patent troll," I'm sure you'll be flattered when the patent owner uses your own damages calculations against you. Actually, on second thought, here's betting you won't like it much at all.
Brian J. Love is an assistant professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law, where he teaches courses in patent law and remedies.

 

Wednesday, 22 August 2012

Apple granted patent for ad-skipper

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Another front has opened in the attack on commercials.
Apple received a patent Tuesday for technology that would allow users to switch seamlessly to their own audio or video files once ads started playing on their TV or radio.
Unlike Dish Network's Auto Hop feature that allows users to bypass ads, with the Apple device, a user's iTunes library would kick in and play music, video or a podcast.
As for Apple's plan, according to the patent approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office: "When an electronic device determines that an upcoming media item in a media broadcast is not of interest to a user, the electronic device can switch playback from the media stream to a media item from the electronic device local library," the patent said.
The networks are not likely to be happy. CBS, Fox and NBC already have filed lawsuits against Dish, saying Auto Hop is illegal and reduces the advertising revenue the networks depend on to purchase programming.
The feds granted the tech titan the new patent just a week after clearing the way for Apple to create a TiVo-like box that would allow the recording or pausing of live television.
The new patent seems to increase the speculation surrounding a revamped, broadcast-integrated Apple TV.
It also could impair talks Apple is currently having with top network executives to negotiate a deal that could bring live television to Apple TV, limited at first to streaming services like Netflix, Hulu or iTunes rentals.
AppleInsider was the first to report on the patent.

Latest Filings and Granted Patents Of Major Industries

Latest Filings and Granted Patents Of Major Industries

The above link will lead you to the latest filing and granted patents of some major Industries at a glance look............

Wednesday, 15 August 2012

Google’s “Prior Art Finder”

Google’s “Prior Art Finder”

Google announced a major update to their Google Patents search tool yesterday. These changes include two main offerings:
1. The inclusion of EP documents
2. The introduction of the “Prior Art Finder” tool
As of the writing of this blog post, it appears that while EP documents are available within the Google Patents search system (such as this document), they do not come up normally in results lists for search queries. This is the case even when using verbatim title searching or document number searching, and the advanced search form does not include any options for searching EP documents, either. However, this seems like a glitch or gradual roll-out that Google is well known for and not a permanent issue. The inclusion of EP documents is a major boon to those who prefer Google Patents over Espacenet (in the free search tool domain). EP data is but the first step towards making Google Patents a more viable search tool for more than a quick starting point or “silver-bullet” type search.
As for the Prior Art Finder tool: I’ve got a lot to say about how that feature works, what it can do for the professional searcher, and what it means for the future of prior art search after the jump.

Google’s Prior Art Finder tool is accessible from any individual patent document within Google Patents’ system.
Prior Art Finder pros
1. Query generation is automatic – Starting a query with the Prior Art Finder couldn’t be easier. Users need only to click the blue “Find prior art” button at the top of any individual patent document within Google Patents. From there, search terms are automatically mined and generated from the full available text of the document. Accompanying the term generation is an automatic end date for search results that coincides with the extracted filing date from the patent document (putting the “prior” in prior art).


2. Federated search through various Google entities is helpful – Users accustomed to running separate strings in Google Scholar and Google Books will be assisted by the fact that both of these valuable search tools will be queried simultaneously through the Prior Art Finder. Switching between results sets is accomplished by selecting the category at the top of the results page, and the pre-loaded entries load instantaneously and conveniently.
3. Post search modification is user-friendly – Automatically generated search terms are clearly displayed (no black-box here!). Along with supplementary generated terms, can be toggled on-and-off with ease and search results will be instantly updated. Additionally, the custom date range fields can similarly be modified.

 Prior Art Finder cons
1. Results are limited to Google search engines – Prior Art Finder merely searches Google Scholar, Google Patents, Google Books, Google People, and Google Web. It will not search valuable prior art databases that Google does not have the access to index, ruling out a vast majority of the available “non-patent” prior art available to expert searchers. As a result, those seeking a complete professional prior art search will find that Prior Art Finder is merely a first drop in the bucket.


 2. Queries must be generated from a document present in Google Patents’ database – This means if it’s not a US or EP document in Google’s database, you’re out of luck for automatic query generation. There is no currently available easy way to create your own query, but a work-around can be accomplished by using any patent document in the Google system as a starting point, erasing the automatically generated terms, and entering your own. At this point, however, users may be better suited to generate their own queries in each separate Google search product. At the same time, it would be nice to have the interface of Prior Art Finder and the functionality of the federated nature of the tool available for brand new queries.

 3. Automatic query generation and results are hit-and-miss – Testing on a patent for a “Thread-measuring feeding device” came up with results for yarn properties, blood regulation, human motion analysis, fly fishing, and computer threading (and this was just in the “Top 10″). At this stage, Prior Art Finder is far from a panacea for those looking for the next evolution in automated prior art search. It just goes to show that the “neck-top computer” still can’t be beat when it comes to complex and semantic heavy problems such as patent and prior art searching.


 One further note: the Google Research blog post about this update leads me to believe that many further updates may be coming to Google Patents. One can only hope that the sleeping giant in the search field has been awakened to the possibilities and growing necessity of providing patent search tools!


The Patent Family Tree tool (PFTT)

Claim Set Comparison... Tool

Claim Set Comparison Tool
Ever wondered how the claims changed between the published application and the issued patent? Frustrated with figuring out the difference between the U.S. claims and the foreign counterpart claims? This handy tool compares two sets of claims and highlights the difference between them. The comparison chart can be displayed in a new browser window or downloaded as a word or excel file. 





Patentfish.com... A new Patent search tool

A new EPO classification scheme for climate change mitigation technologies

Climate Change Mitigation Technologies (CCMTs) are becoming increasingly more important, both politically and economically. Having recognized this, the EPO cooperated with the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and the International Centre on Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) and produced a study on Patents and Clean Energy. To consolidate the efforts invested in this study, the Y02 patent classification was created. This is a tagging scheme developed by experienced examiners working in the relevant fields, in cooperation with external experts, for patent documents related to CCMTs, which provides additional classification next to the regular ECLA and IPC classification of such documents. Patent documents were tagged by means of search strategies by experienced expert examiners, which were formalized into algorithms that can be re-run periodically to update the classes. Currently there are 2 subclasses: Y02C (for Greenhouse gas capture and storage) and Y02E (CCMTs relating to energy generation, transmission or distribution). At the time of writing, over 650,000 documents have been tagged with Y02 codes. A comparison between published patent documents with Y02 tags and published patent documents in general confirms that over the last 15 years the annual amount of patents related to “clean energy” has grown more than twice as fast as the average of all patents. The Y02 codes are available and searchable through Espacenet or PATSTAT.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0172219011001979

Intellectual property rights squabble erupts in industry group

The little-known industry group Certification Authority Browser (CA/B) Forum is suddenly becoming better known, as the bickering of the powerful companies associated with it gets louder as they squabble over intellectual property rights, part of a process in redefining how the group functions.
CA/B Forum, which takes up complex technology issues associated with public-key infrastructure (PKI) and digital certificates, a few years ago came up with what's called the "Extended Validation certificate," which requires a much tighter verification process to prove the identity of the entity requesting the certificate. That was certainly a crowning achievement. But since August, CA/B Forum, comprised mainly of browser makers and CAs that issue certificates, has melted down from 49 to 33 members as only those companies willing to sign off on the intellectual property rights (IPR) agreement document the group devised are allowed to stay on as members.
RELATED: New NIST encryption guidelines may force feds to replace old websites
According to members quarrelling over it, the new IPR document basically stipulates that members must disclose all patents related to PKI and digital certificates they have in order to retain the right to claim licensing royalties for any technologies the CA/B Forum comes up with in the future around it. In other words, the idea is put your cards on the table before new technology gets developed.
"Legally, we can't comply with it," Jon Callas, chief technology officer at Entrust, says about the IPR document. Entrust felt it had to resign from the CA/B Forum because its internal legal department couldn't approve the CA/B legal document it was asked to sign.
The problem, according to Callas, is that Entrust, privately owned by private equity firm Thoma Bravo, can't make assurances about everything affiliated with the private-equity firm, much of which it might not even know about. Entrust, a founding member that played a big role in creating the EV certificate, "wants to be involved" in the CA/B Forum, Callas says.
Besides Entrust, other companies known to have resigned their memberships include IdenTrust, RSA, RIM and Verizon Cybertrust. These declined to sign the IPR agreement, acknowledges Dean Coclin, senior director of business development at Symantec. He says T-Systems, based in Germany, had also balked at the IPR agreement but now appears likely to sign it.
Symantec is believed to have about 38% global share of the general SSL certificate market, and about 65% of the EV certificate market; for its part, Entrust is believed to have 1.2% and 2.47% respectively, according to Netcraft. The year-over-year overall market growth in SSL certificates is said to be more than 20%, with the EV certificate market growing at about 33%.
"We all want Entrust back in the Forum," says Coclin. "They had a problem with the way 'affiliate' is defined." He adds that an attempt at reconciliation is being made. Entrust had chaired the group, but with the departure of Entrust, the group now has two acting co-chairs, Symantec and DigiCert.

Google Enhances Patent Search Service – InformationWeek

Google, the target of more than a hundred patent lawsuits in the past decade, has expanded the scope of its patent search capabilities and added a new search tool to help those investigating patent claims.
To its database of patents filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office--a separate search service when introduced in 2006 and recently integrated with Google Search--Google has added patents filed with the European Patent Office.
In addition, the company has added a tool called Prior Art Finder. "Prior art" is a legal term for records of innovation that preceded a specific patent claim.
"Typically, patents are granted only if an invention is new and not obvious," explains Google engineering manager Jon Orwant in a blog post. "To explain why an invention is new, inventors will usually cite prior art such as earlier patent applications or journal articles. Determining the novelty of a patent can be difficult, requiring a laborious search through many sources, and so we've built a Prior Art Finder to make this process easier."
[ Google is making changes in a number of areas. Read Google Cuts 4,000 Motorola Mobility Jobs. ]
Prior Art Finder culls key phrases from existing patent listings and searches for them in Google Patents, Google Scholar, and Google Books, as well as the rest of the Internet.
Google last year complained about "the explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation," as Kent Walker, Google SVP and general counsel, put it. Its Prior Art Finder could help by reducing the granting of patents that don't represent genuine innovation and by helping companies accused of patent infringement identify prior art that may invalidate an infringement claim.
Dennis Crouch, associate professor of law at the University of Missouri School of Law and the author of the law blog Patently-O, notes on his blog that every technique used for identifying prior art has shortcomings. "The proper question for Google's tools is whether the new system has a role in the patenting process," he says. "At minimum, it is likely an improvement on the quick pre-filing 'sanity check' searches that are often conducted by patent applicants and patent attorneys."
However, Patrick Anderson, president of IP research service Patent Calls and author of the blog Gametime IP, proposes a different name for Google's Prior Art Finder: "Infringement Finder." He argues that finding patents issued later than the source patent, rather than earlier, can help identify potential infringement.
"By speeding up access to information that may lead to evidence of infringement, Google puts more power back into the hands of inventors and patent owners," he writes, noting that Google has invested significantly in patents through acquisitions like Motorola Mo

Apple Lands TV Menu-Overlay Patent

Apple has been granted a patent covering an on-screen TV menu that presents contextually aware navigation options for live or recorded television programming -- but whether the consumer-electronics giant incorporates it into any products is anyone's guess
U.S. Patent No. 8,243,017, "Menu Overlay Including Context Dependent Menu Icon," describes a video device that generates a context-sensitive menu overlay within the on-screen display. Apple applied for the patent in October 2006 and the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office granted it Aug. 14.
The patent details an on-screen guide for live TV and DVR programming that determines what menus and controls to display, based on the type of content being viewed. For example, the system would present an interactive delete icon within the overlay for DVR content, then replace it with a record button after determining that the video source changed to a broadcast video source.
"Often the large number of options and menus available to a user are not presented to the user in an intuitive manner," according to the text of the patent. "The lack of an intuitive user interface and a similarly uncomplicated control device are often a source of user frustration."
Apple currently sells a $99 set-top device, the Apple TV, which provides access to Internet video sources including Netflix, YouTube and Hulu Plus but not conventional linear TV. The CE giant has been rumored to be developing an integrated TV set, although there is scant evidence of one to date.