Comments on: Come in Texas East District Court, your time is up

By: Jeff Darcy

Jeff Darcy — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:40:42 +0000

The important thing to remember about patents is that they’re all about the claims. While the bulk of the document is often taken up with long descriptions of obvious things, that’s largely irrelevant. If the claims cover only some non-obvious combination of those things, then the patent can still be considered valid (to the extent that software patents are ever valid).

None of that applies in this case, though. As I’ve written about on my own site (see http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/?p=2572), the ideas in Prust’s patents were at the very least obvious and might even have been present in publicly available implementations – all at the time of filing, not just when the patents were granted. I’m practically certain that there’s abundant prior art to invalidate all three, if only somebody would track down the people from now-failed dot-com companies that were involved.

By: Steve Craggs

Steve Craggs — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:42:43 +0000

Vincent,
Sorry, but the dumbing down point doesn’t wash in my view. It is quite easy to dumb down the concept of a script – most people are familiar with sat-nav or route planners from the web that are a script of actions. This could be contrasted to having a chauffer who you can tell where you want to go and who does the route planning in his (or her) head.
I think you hit the nail on the head, though, with the mismatch between patent board and court interpretation. This seems to open up a chasm where a patent is approved based on one understanding of a definition, but the court then chooses another which would have resulted in the patent being rejected if it had been used originally.
Lastly, are you suggesting that because East Texas is the ditrict where patent trials and the appeals process are fastest, then it is the best? Best for who? Best for the plaintiff? Certainly – might as well find out quick if you are going to make your billions or not. But best for justice? Do you really feel that this court is the only one ‘in step’?
I know the wheels of justice can seem pathetically slow, but sacrificing justice at the expense of expediency is something to be resisted strenuously.

By: Vincent McBurney

Vincent McBurney — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 03:13:03 +0000

Part of the problem is that the judge needs to explain a patent to a jury in terms the jury will understand, so the patent gets dumbed down. A script (which any IT expert knows to be a set of text commands) becomes anything that runs. Once dumbed down it can be used far more widely than was intended by the patent board. There does not seem to be common ground between how the patent board evaluates the uniqueness of a patent and how the courts apply it.
The only thing preventing millions of software patent trials from entering the system is the prohibitive cost of being a plaintiff and the uncertainty of success.
There are plenty of examples of patent trials outside of Texas are worse – Texas tends to have the fastest cases and fastest appeals process and no nonsense judges. In other states a patent case can drag on for many years with blunders that forces the appeals court to call for a retrial.