Apple's iPod Interface Patent in Jeopardy

Gadget Guy writes "Apple has been denied on their quest to patent the iPod software interface. According to AppleInsider - 'Standing in Apple's way appears to be a prior filing by inventor John Platt, who submitted a patent application for a similar software design for a portable device in May of 2002 - just five months before Robbin submitted his claims on behalf of Apple.'" The Register also helps to shed a little additional light on the subject.

First Prime Factorization Post

[2*2*3*75011]

2002 = 2*7*11*13

Re:Nothing will happen

[garcia]

From what I see of all this, Apple will just keep throwing the patent back until it does finally get passed.

That's exactly what Platt did:

But Platt's playlist application also has a rejection history. It received an NFR on 17 November 2002, and a more serious Final Rejection on 14 June 2004. After further documentation was received, and extension granted, the application received another NFR on 11 December last year.

So, it's obvious that the Patent Office is looking at applications and not just stamping them through w/o checking a simple search first... So we get pissed off when they don't search and we get pissed off when they do?

You can't have it both ways.

Wrong link for the patent

[dan dan the dna man]

Platts patent is here [uspto.gov] I personally cant see the relevance of the patents to each other but IANAPL :)

Re:Intellectual Property

[pauljlucas]

Yet, the person that manages to get to the patent office first gets the patent.

That's not true. If the first person publishes/distributes first without patent, then it becomes prior art for the second patent that is then not granted because of the prior art (or is granted, but then thrown out). Hence, nobody gets a patent.

Not exactly

[autopr0n]

The first inventor can go out and patent the idea up to 2 years after publicizing it.

Re:Obviousness

[sharkb8]

There is, it's called an interference. Basically, it's a way to see who devloped something first. However, they don't generally judge both patents on the merits during an interference, just the date of invention. The junior patent applicaiton will then have to narrow the scope of their claims to avoid the senior patent.

Re:Intellectual Property

[bill_mcgonigle]

So, what's the ruckus about?

The iPod shipped October 23, 2001. This other patent was filed May 2002.

Did this other guy publish prior to the iPod shipping?

Re:2 points

[Joe Decker]

But Platt's playlist application also has a rejection history.

Moot.

The rejection of Platt's patent would in no way invalidate it's use as prior art for invalidating a different patent. One of the great things about patent applications, even rejected ones, is that they form a trail of prior art that can be used to invalidate future attempts to patent ideas.

Re:Intellectual Property

[sharkb8]

The United States is not a first to file Country. In fact, it's one of the last first to invent countries. The patent protection runs from the time you file, because the applicaiton is concrete prrof that you have "reduced the invention to practice". If you get bounced by prior art, in some cases you can antedate the prior art by showing through inventors notebooks, test results, etc, that you conceived the idea at a time earlier than the prior art and were dilegently working to reduce the invention to practice. In the present Apple case, they probably have nothing showing an inventin date earlier than the prior art.

The moral here is, if you're working on something cool, soemthing that you might want to patent, write it down. Even a diagram or sketch can help you if it's dated.

Parent is funny, but its quite true...

[hoka]

Freshie year of college (not that long ago) I wrote a short research paper on tech patents. Included were statistics showing the influx of patents around the tech boom, and more importantly the acceptance rate of these patents. What you could clearly see is that the acceptance rate was very high, and it wasn't because everybody was innovative. It's because at the time, the patent examiners wern't as technical in the relevant field of the patents they were examining, but this hasn't really changed much up to today. Since patents are mostly written to be over-generalized on purpose, its hard to get a real idea of what the patent is trying to do, and therefore hard to come up with prior art or to determine whether it is innovative, non-obvious, etc. Not even the computer system upgrade and bringing in more patent examiners has appeared to help with the quality of the accepted patents, or the immense backlog of patents thats causing problems.

Re:Nothing will happen

[stuckinarut]

does ANYONE deserve a 20 YEAR monopoly on ipod-like devices? No.

Does anyone deserve a monopoly that long be it a software patent or copyright? The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years.

As a consequence of the act, under current law, no copyrighted works will enter into the public domain in the United States until January 1, 2019 at the earliest, when the copyright on works created in 1923 would expire. [wikipedia.org]

It just about making money!

Very Badly Titled

[Nom du Keyboard]

Apple's iPod Interface Patent in Jeopardy

This is very badly titled. They don't have this patent yet. It's their application that's in possible jeopardy.

Re:It would be humorous to note...

[Anonymous Coward]

i know that Sun SPARCstations came with optical mice that used the metal, grid mouse pads, far before optical mice were offered by MS.

(off topic, i've had the same "security word" within a few days. is this intentional or detrimental?)

Re:Nothing will happen

[Joffrey]

As a patent attorney, I can tell you that generally speaking a so-called "Final Rejection," is more dependent upon Patent Office budgeting procedures than the merits of the underlying patent application.

In order to control expenses at the PTO, and to prevent examiners from spending all their time with the more "tenacious" applicants, the PTO suggests that a second rejection typically be deemed "Final." All this really means is that you can file a "continuation" application, with a new filing fee to effectively buy more hours of the examiner's time.

While it is often annoying to clients, at least it tries to allocate costs to those people using the most resources.

Re:Good

[pauljlucas]

... the software... nah. You shouldn't be able to.

Technically, one doesn't patent software. What's really patented is the device the machine becomes while running said software. This casts "comptuers running software" into the age-old "methods and aparatus" framework that the patent office has been using since its inception. (Ask a good patent attorney if you don't believe me.)

Hence, the lump of plastic and metal that is the iPod becomes a portable music player while it is running its software. You seem to have a problem with that. Yet if I invent a portable music player that somehow does it all in hardware, you're presumeably OK with that.

Why should the inventor who chooses to make his life easier by using software to make a portable music player not receive the same protections as the all-hardware inventor? From the end-user's point of view, it's a portable music player: s/he doesn't care how it's implemented.

You've got to remember that there are tens of millions of computer programmers out there.

Why? You mean if there were tens of millions of hardware developers out there then portable music players implemented solely using hardware shouldn't be patentable? The number of people in the field is irrelevant.

By patenting it (and enforcing the patent), you're not creating something new and wonderful for the world to use

Of course you are. When and how you allow the world to use it is entirely seperate from the act of its creation. Anyway, the above would seem to apply equally to all patents. So then you presumeably don't want any patents on anything whatsoever.

au contraire, you're denying the world something new and wonderful to use, or imposing limits on its use.

That's precisely what a patent is for. If you want to invent something and let nobody use it, that's entirely your right. It's financially stupid of you, but you can do it. The smart thing to do is to license your patent to make money to recoup the time/money you invested on inventing in the first place.

Now if you're some guy who doesn't want to spend the money to pay for the license, well then you're free to invent something new and better, and, if you're so philanthropic, give it away for free (but you'd be a fool to do so).

Some guy and Apple both independently created this "interface." They both did the R&D, they both would have done so regardless of whether patent laws existed, but one, at the end of this, is going to get a monopoly on producing stuff with this technology. How is that fair?

And how is this specific to software? Why couldn't this have been about two guys in different labs who invented some hardware device? The fact that it's software is irrelevant. A double-standard should not exist.

As for this case, yes, it's seems unfair (but the unfairness has got nothing to do with the fact that it's software). Perhaps there could be something like a "co-patent" if it can be proven that two seperate, clean-room inventions were done. But that's far to problematic and lawyers would have a field day. Just like it's far simpler to say the legal drinking age is 21, it's far simpler to say he who files first, gets the patent.

Re:I'll take...

[The_K4]

The priot-artist appears to be Microsoft [microsoft.com]. So that's a very real possibility......the MS iPod?

Re:Good

[pauljlucas]

I see no reason why any lump of plastic and wires that plays music should be patentable, regardless of whether it's functionality is implemented in hardware or software.

By that reason, nothing at all should be patentable, i.e., patents shouldn't exist for anything. That argument isn't even worthy of discussion.

can't remember ever hearing of a single software patent that I really think would be non-obvious to an experienced software developer.

The ones that make sense don't make the news.

Re:Nothing will happen

[s!mon]

I am honestly dismayed when people ask questions like this.

I'm just trying to make a point - not defend the system. The reality of the situation is if you don't meet the quota, you don't have a job. So you work within the system and do as best you can. Even you admit you've done that.

FWIW, I would absolutely do my job correctly, which would to investigate them throughly and take the required time (especially if I was doing something that was publically funded). I think it's a poor reflection on character to take the easy way out when the right thing to do ought to be clear.

I agree. See above reasoning. BTW - the PTO isn't publicly funded. Its funded from the patent fees (and a good portion is then siphoned off into the government).

I'd be a very poor engineer if I didn't do my job properly just to please management and make them look like they are on top of things.

This isn't about doing a good job. This is about having a job. It should be about doing the best job you can. But as long as there are too many applications and the threshold for a patent is so low, the low quality of patent examination will persist. There are solutions out there for these problems, and maybe in due time they will be implemented.