Apple Granted Broad Patent On Wedge-Shaped Laptops 326
Nick Fel writes "Apple has been granted a broad patent (PDF) on the wedge-shaped design of the MacBook Air. The design has been copied by most ultrabooks, and their manufacturers are likely starting to feel a little uneasy about the news."
Awesome... (Score:4, Insightful)
...yet another thing granted to the rapacious by the incompetent.
Re:Awesome... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a design patent... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not a "broad" patent on any wedge shaped laptop but instead a relatively narrow patent on portions of the ornamental design of the Macbook air. Looking at the priority date, you'll see that the earliest filing date is 2010, which means that even the original Macbook Air models are prior art for this case.
Look at the listing of prior art and you'll see PLENTY of wedge-shaped notebooks that are already out there... because this patent is *not* covering all wedge-shaped notebooks, despite the intentionally hyped-up-so-we'll-make-ad-revnue summary & headline. (P.S. I run adblock to help do my part to have Slashdot lose money for posting this drivel).
Shenanigans!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Pretty soon all useful physical designs will be patented and there will be no room to innovate without fear of A. Being sued into oblivion or B. Paying a significant portion of start-up costs to patent holders.
Way to keep the money at the top USPTO.
Re:Awesome... (Score:4, Insightful)
'Prior art and obvious' do not appear to be reasons to not file for a patent, from what I've seen. In fact, they might be reasons to apply: If people have done it, and it's obvious, surely someone will get a patent on it soon, and you don't want to have to pay patent licensing fees. (Or worse.)
Endless Apple Patent Discussions (Score:5, Insightful)
Functional parts (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't kill the messenger (Score:4, Insightful)
It has to do with their funding model.
A few years ago I remember reading how congress lived up to their name and decided to cut back on funding at the USPTO (or even make it a profit centre)
Next thing you know they are willing to patent anything from though processes to math equations.
If challenges to patents meant the USPTO would share even 10% of the court costs when the patent is invalidated, this shit would get fixed quickly.
Free rider problem solved? (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents and copyrights are used only to protect past acompilishments not create new ones.
The entire purpose of patents and copyrights is to create incentives for new works. Patents and copyright attempt to address the free rider problem [wikipedia.org]. Without some reasonable assurance of protection, a lot of beneficial works would never be created.
None of this is to say the laws for patents and copyrights aren't badly in need of updating. They very much are broken in their current form. But the idea of protecting inventive works against the free rider problem is demonstrably beneficial.
Stronger IP protections are only used to slow down growth. It is all but ignored by growing economies.
This is where your argument falls apart. Without relatively strong IP protections, there are fewer incentives to create new work because there are so many copycats. Those same growing economies grow largely by imitating established economies with established IP protections. They tend to create very few (not zero but few) new and innovative works. You can only grow to a limited extent by copying other people. Eventually you have to create your own works and sooner or later that requires some form of IP protection. The exact model can vary but for better or worse there is presently no better solution to the free rider problem out there.
Re:Free rider problem solved? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Functional parts (Score:2, Insightful)
Yea, let's just ignore that Apple sued Samsung for using ROUND FUCKING CORNERS on phones in Germany. But Apple would never use such a thing in an anti-competitive manner. Trust me, I'm a doctor!
Re:Awesome... (Score:4, Insightful)
Design patents period should not exist.
Trademarks exist to prevent consumer confusion that is it. There is nothing so novel in making a laptop a wedge shape or flat that deserves protecting.
Re:Free rider problem solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me see you come up with the scratch needed to develop a new drug. Patents are needed to encourage private investments in new technology.
Re:Free rider problem solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting notion. You know, when I decide to create something, the only time patents cross my mind is something like "does somebody have a patent on something that they can twist to try to cover my creation and cause me harm?". In other words, the current environment does stifle innovation, even in cases like mine where most of my stuff would be obvious to a person skilled in my profession faced with a similar problem--and therefore should not be patentable in the first place. Well, unless one is a large corporation and immune from any and all rules.
What's really wrong with your IP maximalist argument is that Apple is its own answer. Apple fanboys aren't going to care if somebody has the same shape for their product as Apple does. They won't care if the competing product is better, either. Apple has built a brand that really doesn't need that stuff.
Humanity, in fact, advanced considerably without the rather recent unfortunate invention of "intellectual property". In fact, I shudder to think where we'd be if people hadn't been able to learn from and improve on ideas and inventions.
Re:Free rider problem solved? (Score:5, Insightful)
Limited time patents and copyright on actual innovation or copyrightable works.
This crap that Micky Mickey mouse is still under copyright after 84 years is bullshit.
Patents on the wedge shape are bullshit. Copyrighting of range check code is bullshit.
90%+ of patents now are bullshit. The ones that are not live on in perpetuity. The solution is not to get rid of patent or copyright.
The solution lies in bringing back the limits.
And killing the lawyers of course.
Re:Free rider problem solved? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most progress is not made by totally new and innovative products, but by "standing on the shoulders of giants"... That is, a product which is mostly a copy of a previous one, but with a few improvements here and there.
Developing something new from scratch is time consuming and costly, especially when you have to work around huge numbers of patents... Also if a product is too different to existing ones, users will often reject it because it's too unfamiliar.
Plenty of beneficial works were made before the days of patents or copyrights, and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't do so again were these schemes abolished. People create works for all kinds of reasons, not everyone is purely motivated by profit and greed...
On balance, the current patent/copyright laws do far more to stifle innovation than to promote it.. You have products which are crippled to avoid patents, people afraid to release (or even start developing) products for fear of being sued, works still in copyright when the original author is long dead (many of which will be totally forgotten and/or lost by the time copyright expires) etc etc...
Both copyright and patents were meant to be a compromise between the ability for creators of such works to profit, and the benefit of society as a whole... The current systems however are so distorted and corrupt that they are generally entirely detrimental to society and often to the creators of the works too.
For-profit also causes innovations to be stifled, why release a new (expensive, requiring retooling etc) product, when you can continue selling your existing one?
Re:Free rider problem solved? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless - gasp - social funds, not private investments, are used to develop new drugs. That way we don't have to worry about making a few pigs filthy rich as a side effect of the process.
Gee, sounds like exactly what governments ought to be doing, to me.
Re:Free rider problem solved? (Score:5, Insightful)
NONSENSE! Shut your face! With nothing but stupid "social funds" we would cure nothing but the dumbest stupidest things like malaria which only kills a few million people a year. How the hell would we ever have enough "social funds" to cure the important things like flaccid penises and hair loss that affects millions of very rich people? HOW? You ever stop to think before you open your stupid ape mouth?
Sheesh, the nerve on some people!
Re:Free rider problem solved? (Score:5, Insightful)
If your post was a patent application, I'd reject it over several unsupported claims. Patents were not intended to fix the "free rider" problem. Anything innovating enough to deserve a patent could be kept a trade secret instead. Things that can be easily copied are by definition more derivative than innovating. This wedge based design for example; it's an obvious advance made possible by continued reduction in component size. Once it's becomes possible to shrink things to that form factor, it was inevitable. Cue "shoulders of giants" comments and how many instances of co-discovery litter scientific history.
What patents were intended to do was let an inventor make a deal with the world. They could get monopoly rights on their invention in return for sharing it with everyone. Other companies wouldn't have to reverse engineer the process, they could just license it for a fee instead. The production capabilities of the world move forward; other companies don't have to waste time re-inventing the same wheel.
If it's possible to re-invent the wheel in question without seeing the so-called "intellectual property", it wasn't a non-obvious advance. That's where the bar is supposed to be at here, with an explicit obviousness test. That test has been weakened into a ridiculously low one now. And the result is a patent process that does nothing but weaken business. There is no value being provided by patent holders anymore, no resulting benefit to society sufficient that they should be rewarded with a monopoly on something. The social contract implied by the patent process is no longer being honored by the companies patenting things, and instead they're just stifling innovation, by small companies in particular.
Re:Free rider problem solved? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me see you come up with the scratch needed to develop a new drug. Patents are needed to encourage private investments in new technology
A lot of the money is going towards marketing. A lot of the expense is for drugs that are designed to do nothing more than replace alternatives that have gone off-patent. A lot of times, the new drug carries side effects and/or is less effective than the cheap generic.
Take all of that out, and new drugs would still be developed. Instead of being developed by a company to make $billions in profit, they'd be developed by grad students who think that "John Smith Phd, the guy who cured pancreatic cancer" is a pretty cool thing to have on a resume. He'll do it for a nice 6-figure professor job. Much cheaper, and the new drug will be available at cost. I wager a system like that will actually be much, much cheaper for everybody--except the kind of people who are keeping cancer drugs in short supply because they don't help the bottom line. Fuck them.
Re:Awesome... (Score:5, Insightful)
The concern here is the the same as the rounded corners things last year. Apple designs are, intentionally, minimalist designs. Granting of design patents on what amounts to purely functional designs is problematic. The Dutch court last year struck down the rounded corner design patent (called community design in Europe) because there were not any non-functional elements and the court held that purely functional designs are less worthy of protection. I think the U.S. would be wise to adopt the same stance.
Just to reiterate, the problem with this patent is not design vs. utility, it is the functional nature of the design that should not be worthy of design patent protection.
Re:Free rider problem solved? (Score:4, Insightful)
"This crap that Micky Mickey mouse is still under copyright after 84 years is bullshit."
You might want to notice he has changed over the years, and ther eis a reason fore that.
Yes, Copyright is too long. 14 years is fine, even 20.
20 is too long.
This is a design patent for a specific things. It's for laptops, with a wedge, that are brushed nickle, have their feet is a specific space, etc. They did not get a utlity patent on the wedge. It prevents confusion. Seeing how many companies are trying to copy the specific design, it prevent market confusion.
" Copyrighting of range check code is bullshit."
format.
Oracle vs Google.
"90%+ of patents now are bullshit. "
That's a lie.
That would be your opinion.
Yes, kill the lawyers, that way no one can defend you from anything. Twit.
Getting rid of lawyers would help alot.
No law should ever be written that you need a lawyer to defend you for.
Justice should not come at a cost. Laws are either simple or unjust.
Re:Awesome... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think a design patent has a place. It as an extension of trademark. The problem with THIS design patent is that it is attempting to monopolize the most efficient engineering design for a thin laptop computer (the wedge shape) and not some cosmetic design to differentiate themselves from the competition. This strays precariously close to utility patent territory. Design patents should be required to have non-functional distinguishing features. So long as you avoid that/those features then you are in the clear. This patent is purely functional and hence should not have been granted.
Apple attempted to argue last year in the Netherlands that Samsung tablets violated their equally vague European Community Design on a rectangular device with rounded corners. The Dutch court held that, in essence, Apple had simply taken the most efficient shape for their product and attempted to monopolize it. This is not the purpose of a Community Design nor a Design Patent. Engineering issues should be covered by utility patents, not design patents.