What Is A Patent?

Apple Patent

 

Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs has ushered in the patent war he predicted might happen when he unveiled the iPhone in 2007. In that keynote, Steve Jobs remarked that, “boy have we patented it.” in reference to the revolutionary iPhone.

Unfortunately, for Steve and Apple, his worst fear came through, he was  betrayed by one of his most trusted allied (Google). Google went on to release, the now very successful competing Android operation system, which bears a lot of similarities to Apple’s iOS .

Anyway, what followed is the mother of all patent and war.  Charles Arthur  of The Guardian has put together a very insightful article on what is a patent to what you can do about patent wars.

My guess is not a lot.

Here are a few snippets from the article:

 

What is a patent?

[quote] Yes, let’s start here. A patent is a government-granted monopoly to an invention. It’s bestowed on the inventor who files for it with the relevant patent office. As Patent Baristas put it: “Patent applicants must show that the invention is new and non-obvious and applicants must describe the invention such that a person in the industry would know how to make and use the invention.”

Let’s unpack that. To qualify as a patent, something must be

a) novel – so a patent application can be disqualified by “prior art” showing the same concept portrayed elsewhere at or before the application

b) non-obvious – the test being that someone in the field in which it’s filed, at the time at which it is filed, wouldn’t see it as a direct extension of what exists (so adding an extension to a paint roller is “obvious”, but you might find a “non-obvious” way to attach that extension to the existing roller) – this is exactly the same as the idea of an “inventive step”

c) feasible – so you can’t patent a perpetual motion machine or something else that, say, breaches the Second Law of Thermodynamics.[/quote]

 

What’s “patent infringement”?

[quote] Producing something that has the same features or performs the same function in a way that’s covered by the patent that’s already been granted.

Example: take Apple‘s “slide to unlock” system for the iPhone, which has been patented in the US and Europe. (Ignore for a moment the question of whether it should have been awarded. Just accept that it has.) If you produced a phone interface that looked and functioned exactly the same, you could expect Apple to come after you. But if you produced a touch interface with a thin line along which you slide a ball to unlock the screen, you could expect that that too would be judged “infringing”. That’s why HTC and Motorola changed the interface of their Android phones in Germany: a court there reckoned that their interfaces infringed Apple’s patent. (We’ll explain why it was Motorola and HTC, not Google, which was sued in a minute.)

However, if you can find a way to get the same outcome but by a different route (ie, avoiding the existing patent’s “inventive step”) then you aren’t infringing. But often that has to be decided in a court, either by a judge or jury – an expensive outcome that’s generally to be avoided.

To show infringement in registered designs, you’d have to show that the infringing object looked very similar to the registered one.[/quote]

 

What’s FRAND?

[quote] So: you have a new standard, and it comes with a series of patents. As part of the standards approval process run in Europe by the ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute), the holders of those patents agree that they will license them to anyone who wants to implement the standard on a “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” (FRAND) basis. In the US it’s often known just as RAND – the “fair” element isn’t thought to add anything special to the description.

“Non-discriminatory” means that you’ll license it to anyone – Microsoft, Apple, Joe Bloggs – who asks to license it. This is very important: if someone offers to license your standards-essential patent to meet the standard, you’re required to license it. Refusing to do so is frowned on by the US government, the European Commission, ETSI, and possibly your mother.[/quote]

 

So we should expect these patent battles to just carry on?

[quote] Perhaps. There have been reports that Google has been making overtures to Apple for some sort of peace, although its acquisition of Motorola Mobility – which was meant to give it a big patents warchest – doesn’t seem to have worked out quite as straightforwardly as expected. If Apple wants this to go on, it could do. But there are some signs that doing so is hurting its public reputation, while heightening that of the companies it sues: in Australia, for example, many people had no idea that Samsung had a tablet offering until they began hearing news reports about Apple seeking to ban it. And the billion-dollar win in the US over Samsung may have brought the Korean company to the attention of people who didn’t previously know of it as a worthy rival in the smartphone space.  [/quote]

 

That’s depressing. What can I do to make these companies stop doing this?

[quote] Sadly, this is like being an ancient Greek; they imagined there were multiple gods who were often at war with each other, leaving mere mortals as spectators. That’s the situation we find ourselves in.[/quote]

 

Read More: The Guardian

Posted by | Posted at October 28, 2012 20:18 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Storm is a technology enthusiast, who resides in the UK. He enjoys reading and writing about technology.

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