Posts tagged patent
Third Critical Rambus Patent Invalidated, Nvidia Vindicated
Jan 27th
U.S. Patent # 6,591,353, “Protocol for Communication with Dynamic Memory,” tends to refer to a “memory device.” The innovation with respect to this device appeared to be the introduction of a synchronous clock. That way, time-multiplexed transfers could take place in a regulated fashion.
But as USPTO documents published today show, the appeals judges found that two existing patents cited by Nvidia qualify as prior art, and moreover, that the teachings demonstrated by those older patents would be inspiration enough for a skilled artisan to apply the teachings to improving synchronous memory the way Nvidia appears to have done.
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In their decision, the judges refer to the patent concepts by the names of their inventors – “Hayes” for the one under contention, “Bennett” for the prior art. Citing directly from the decision:
The Examiner agrees that Hayes discloses a memory device and anticipates claim 1, but maintains that including all the RAM control logic into each Hayes DRAM chip would not have been obvious… But dependent claim 2 recites sampling data synchronously and does not require all the RAM control logic to be integrated into each chip. NVIDIA points out that the term “memory device” in these claims is not limited to a single chip, but even if they are, NVIDIA persuasively shows the obviousness of creating a single chip… The claim 2 memory device, whether as a chip or a broader device, requires strobe functionality which Hayes teaches and synchronization which Bennett teaches according to this record. As NVIDIA persuasively explains, Hayes describes time-multiplexed clock data transfers between a master and slave during different clock cycles, and Bennett teaches benefits to providing a synchronized interface in a memory device using an external clock. The Examiner does not appear to disagree with these findings… NVIDIA also relies on Mr. Parris [an expert witness] who testifies that ordinarily skilled artisans were shifting from asynchronous to synchronous operations to increase speed… Based on this record, NVIDIA shows that it would have been obvious in view of Bennett to implement certain control logic, including a synchronous logic interface, into the memory device of Hayes.
This week’s loss is the latest in a string of bad luck for Rambus, that comes on the heels of what had been an upward trend for a company whose reputation was pretty much created in the courtroom. The uptick began four years ago, when a Federal Trade Commission ruling was overturned. That ruling had found Rambus was withholding critical implementation plans for its memory standards from the JEDEC standards agency, and had sent a signal to the industry that Rambus was unfairly trying to manipulate standards to its own advantage. The overturning of that ruling was the beginning of what had been a glorious resurrection of Rambus’ respect.
But perhaps buoyed too much by the outcome, Rambus then tried to hold the same manufacturers that first accused it of unfair standards manipulation – Hynix Semiconductor and Micron technologies – responsible for essentially the same conduct. The court didn’t buy that argument either, ruling in favor of Hynix and Micron two months ago.
Suddenly, Rambus had resumed its former public image of pursuing greater revenues through litigation. With only three of six patents remaining valid in its case against Nvidia and five others, Rambus may not be able to hold on to even that. Today, Rambus’ stock price hit what memory engineers would call a “low state,” losing another 13% in NASDAQ trading today after already having lost over half its value last November in the wake of the Hynix/Micron decision.
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Congressmen Wary of Facebook Patent That Seeks to Track User Information
Jan 10th
The Hill reports that Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), co-chairmen of the Congressional Privacy Caucus, have accused Facebook of evading questions related to whether it tracks users’ online activities to deliver more targeted ads.
The congressmen were not satisfied with Facebook’s response to questions raised by a February 2011 patent filing. It suggested that the social network tracked users when they were logged off and browsing other non-Facebook sites.
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Facebook’s letter referenced a full audit of Facebook’s non-U.S. completed in December 2011 by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, which instructed the social network to stop retaining advertising data indefinitely.
It also recommended improvements for how data is logged when people access websites with social plugins. The idea is to minimize the amount of information collected about people who are not logged in to Facebook, according to reports from ZDNet.
In its letter to Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), Facebook also discussed location-based advertising.
Facebook says that it gives the advertiser an opportunity to choose the audience based on information Facebook receives about location, including: people who say they live in a specific city, check in somewhere, or specify a location in a status update. As such, the user willingly provides the information to Facebook, who in turn hands it over to the advertiser.
The congressmen remained concerned about the possibility of targeted advertising.
“The main questions of whether Facebook has considered using third-party tracking data to build user profiles or employs user-provided data to target advertising remain unanswered from the company’s response to our letter,” writes Markey in a statement.
“Additionally in its response to us, Facebook states that it uses consumer-provided data for ‘internal operations, including data analysis, research, development, and service improvement’ yet provides no description of what these activities entail or how they affect consumer privacy,” Markey continues.
The congressmen were not satisfied with Facebook’s response.
“Facebook’s seems to be saying one thing and doing another,” said Rep. Barton. “In the company’s response, it talks a lot about how they don’t currently ‘track’ users online, but they just asked for a patent that would allow them to do just that. Why ask for something you don’t ever plan on using?”
Facebook settled with the FTC last November. Earlier this month, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) requested that the FTC investigate possible Timeline privacy breaches.
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Is Microsoft Driving at Google with Bing Maps Improvements & Patent?
Jan 6th
Microsoft announced enhancements to its Bing Maps, including a change to the algorithm that allows the service to process directions requests twice as fast and help drivers avoid traffic.
Those changes, along with a newly-awarded patent for a feature that allows Bing Maps to route pedestrians away from unsafe neighborhoods, suggest Mcirosoft is driving to surpass Google Maps, which has dominated the space since surpassing MapQuest in site traffic and queries in 2008.
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Microsoft has not announced a timetable for implementing the safe routing feature, which would use crime statistics to steer pedestrians away from neighborhoods that don’t meet certain safety thresholds.
The changes that have been launched build off of a Microsoft Research presentation at the 10th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms last May. Those tweaks could be significant because they can incorporate new metrics in a few seconds: fast enough, the paper’s abstract noted, “to support real-time traffic updates and personalized optimization functions.”
The newly enhanced mapping service also allows users to select up to three routes in a single directions request. That’s similar to a feature Google Maps has offered for quite some time, but the recently-upgraded Bing pinpoints potential traffic problems and suggests quicker alternatives.
For example, a trip from Somerville, Mass., where I am typing this post, to South Boston – on the exact opposite side of downtown Boston and peak rush hour traffic – will take 17 to 19 minutes, depending what route I choose, according to Google Maps. Bing, on the other hand, also tells me the 6.6-mile trip will take about 15 minutes. But when I click on a link that lets me view the route based on traffic, Bing serves up real-time traffic conditions, showing construction delays and details and tells me in all likelihood the trip will probably take closer to 22 minutes.
To be fair, the Google Maps results incorporate traffic data as well, but the Bing upgrade makes those traffic problems more obvious by displaying them directly on the map.
A screenshot from a Bing Map route request showing real-time traffic conditions in downtown Boston during rush hour on Jan. 5, 2012.
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Tide Turning Against Google in Android Patent Wars
Dec 21st
Apple has won a major patent victory over HTC and Android as the U.S. FTC affirmed the July patent ruling in Apple’s favor. Meanwhile, UK telecommunications company BT has opened another patent case that targets a wide array of Google services and…
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A History of Online Patent Search
Dec 12th
Last week IBM announced that it has taken chemical data from various patents and made this information available to researchers online. It is just the latest in an ever widening of publically available information concerning patents and intellectual property. But online patent access has had an interesting history, and even though it dates to the early days of the Web, it was a difficult path and an interesting story in public access to information.
In collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont and Pfizer, IBM is providing a database of more than 2.4 million chemical compounds extracted from about 4.7 million patents and 11 million biomedical journal abstracts from 1976 to 2000. IBM Research developed it in collaboration with these private companies over the past six years. It includes patents from a variety of sources outside of the US. The data will be incorporated into the PubChem archive at the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Institutes of Health.
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The US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) receives hundreds of thousands of applications each year and now posts the ones it approves on its own online patent database here. But that wasn’t always the case.
Before the Web, patent searches were long, tedious, and expensive, and province of a select group of private entities. Finding “prior art” (as it is called) was a very specialized field. This started changing, when back in January 1994 Carl Malamud began a project to put patents and other government data online. Malamud has been a tireless advocate for posting more data online by various private and public entities and has been rewarded for his efforts by various awards and funding from Google and numerous foundations started by early Internet pioneers. By 1995 his system was serving up a million files via FTP, Gopher and Web access. (Remember, back then graphical browsers were still somewhat new, and many websites were predominately text-based.)
Sadly, the PTO turned off this access for several years. Malamud lobbied PTO but to no avail, and IBM posted the patent data online until PTO could offer their own service in 1998. Since then, they and others including Google, FreePatentsOnline. Cambia’s PatentLens and LegalZoom (the latter for a fee) offer patent searches.
Malamud told me that “The patent database is pretty much liberated at this point. Jon Orwant at Google did all the heavy lifting, deserves the credit for making this a reality.” You can read a copy of his letter to Al Gore back in 1998 here to get some additional perspective.
(Above you can see Doug Engelbart’s diagram in his 1970 patent for a computer mouse.)
What about non-US patent access? In addition to some of the free sites mentioned above, the European patent office can be searched here using its Espacenet service, which was started in 1998 with bare-bones features. Search was enhanced earlier this year, and you can now export results to Excel, setup RSS feeds, and keep a query history as part of its free service. You can search in English, French and German.
And the World IP Organization maintains its patent search here with its PatentScope service, which also has been expanded and improved.
Patent applications have been growing steadily for the most part, and IBM is the most prolific: each day it is granted about 20 patent applications. Samsung and Microsoft get about half that. That is each calendar day. Apple gets about 500 patents a year, and Google and Motorola less than that. We’re glad to see that more information is entering the public domain, and hope that this trend continues.
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Google Gets Authority Evaluation Patent Criticizing Amazon, Slashdot
Dec 2nd
In a patent application approved Tuesday, Google used the review/comments systems used by Amazon and Slashdot to support their method and gain approval for their “invention”. The problem is the critical thinking applied to the limits of the other …
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Europe Patent Reform Changes the Global Infringement Landscape
Nov 22nd
What if a patent granted in the State of Texas were invalid in Delaware? If the United States were a loose federation of states, as originally envisioned by its Articles of Confederation (the forerunner to its current Constitution), the validity of an invention in one state may have been challenged by another. In the European Union – which is not officially bound by a federal government – inventors (including companies) may apply for a European patent. But then all 27 member states have to incorporate all those patents (or not) into their existing systems.
The principal agenda of Neelie Kroes since ascending to the vice presidency of the European Commission (the upper house of E.U. parliament) is to set forth the so-called “digital agenda” for the continent. But she’s also the standard bearer for a movement called the single market, where Europe as a whole is recognized as a unified trading partner. Key to her agenda is the implementation of a unitary patent system, where a European patent applies to every member country without question. It’s a slow march towards federalism, as well as a move to standardize the classifications of patents, including for software. But today, the pace of that march may have just sped up.
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The Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament (the lower house) announced this morning it has completed work on a standard package of continental patent reform proposals, which will now be brought to 25 of the 27 member states. (Italy and Spain, for the moment, remain holdouts.) The three main components of this plan call for the following:
- A unitary patent system as an “adjunct” to existing methods. As the European Patent Office (EPO) describes it, inventors will still be able to apply for patents in their member countries, but through the authority of the EPO. From there, applicants will have the option of applying for “unitary effect” for the patent – meaning, to have it apply to all of Europe voluntarily. This option apparently addresses member states’ concerns raised in previous years, that a pan-European patent system would rob states of legitimate sources of revenue (applications fees, royalties, etc.). Some countries actually have stakes in the licensing of patents such as those protecting standards such as MP3. Under this “adjunct” system, conceivably those revenue streams would remain untouched.
- Adoption of a standardized “language regime” once a translation matrix becomes operational. In other words, until machine translation makes it possible for an application in any language to be translated into English, and from there into a member state’s language, an English-language translation of the application must be provided by the applicant whenever the language of the EPO office where the patent is being filed is French or German. This relieves the EPO, for the meantime, from the burden of translating every patent it receives into almost every other language there is.
- The creation of a single European patent court, which won’t just be a system for determining the validity of patents and patent applications. It will also serve, as the EPO describes, as “a unified patent litigation system.” The three parts of this litigation system would be a court of first instance, an appeals system, and a registry. But divisions of the first instance court will be scattered throughout the continent, with the effect being that patent infringement cases will take place on a Europe-wide level.
It may take several more years before a majority of E.U. member states adopt a unitary patent system. But once that happens, it may suddenly become economically feasible for software and intellectual property patent holders to challenge defendants in both the U.S. and Europe concurrently. With the perceived value of patents among stakeholders and holding companies alike often determined by their projected “take-home” value in future infringement suits, the question would become whether the European or American system would set the bar for the value of intellectual property worldwide.
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Infographic: The Casualties of Patent Wars (With Lightsabers!)
Nov 8th
MBAOnline.com released an infographic called “Patent Evil: How The Patent War is Stifling Innovation in Silicon Valley”. Now, I know many of you will think I am posting this infographic because they used lightsabers…that is not (completely) true. I really do find the data included shocking. For example, possible number of patent claims a single smartphone may involve and the number of lawsuits over mobile technology this year. The graphics are outstanding and the data important.
Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
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Why Can’t Filing a Patent Be As Easy As Buying a Book?
Oct 14th
I am not a lawyer, and I don’t wish to ever become one (on TV or in real life), much to the disappointment of my mother who once wished that would become my chosen profession. I was reminded of this recently when I reviewed an article that Scott Fulton wrote last month for ReadWriteEnterprise here about the recent changes in our patent law system. It seems we are headed down the wrong path, making it harder for entrepreneurs to obtain and contest patents.
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My intersections with our legal system haven’t been pretty: my divorce, registering a trademark, and an appearance in court to evict my deadbeat renter. Yes, I did serve on a couple of juries. No arrests, thankfully.
What these events have in common is that none of them were things that I initially wanted to do. Including the trademark registration. You see, I was using the name Web Informant for sending out a series of email newsletters, and I have been doing so since 1995. A year or so later, a publishing firm who had (blank) Informant as their titles wanted to come out with a print version using Web Informant. I heard about their intentions and filed a trademark registration, fortunately a few weeks before their own attempt.
Now, on my application, I put the correct date of first use with the first issue of the newsletter, which was in September 1995. The other guys put their date as sometime in 1990, if memory serves me correctly, which was just false but there wasn’t much I could do about, short of spending thousands on legal bills to contest the action. The fact that the Web as we all know it didn’t really exist outside of a few places didn’t really enter into the discussion. As they say on lots of TV legal shows, let’s not confuse the issue with any facts.
Thankfully, things have a way of working out: the print publication went the way of the dodo, and my email newsletter and associated website have endured the test of time. But the whole thing left a bad taste with me for the trademark (and the associated patent) process.
Now we are changing things, so that the first to file will be given consideration for patents. This means if you are an entrepreneur, almost the moment of idea conception is when you need to engage a lawyer and get your application in. It almost seems as if the process is:
- Think up a cool idea.
- Find out if the dot com is taken and register it.
- Find a patent lawyer and send in your application.
- Start working on your product or service and build your business.
This seems wacko to me.
I realize that most of the world uses first to file as the criterion for patents, and in many parts of the world patents aren’t respected at all. But still, this is a step backwards. Yes, there are places like Legalzoom that will help you through this process online, but still it isn’t easy. Filing a patent should be like buying a book on Amazon.
Now, perhaps that is somewhat unfair: when you buy a book, you don’t have to have this dialogue with someone to lay out all your alternatives and to walk you through the purchase process and the various options for different forms that you need to fill out. But why can’t the Patent Office have some simplified process that has the forms online? It is probably impossible, but still.
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Why Innovatio’s Wi-Fi Patent Rampage is a Good Thing
Oct 10th
According to the Patent Examiner, a company called Innovatio IP Ventures is suing individual branches of hotel chains for use of Wi-Fi. Though I’m staunchly against software patents – and by extension software patent lawsuits – I think this is a good thing.
The company is launching a “systematic campaign” according to Matthew McAndrews, the lead litigator for Innovatio. The company is trying to shake down “several hundred” defendants for $2,300 to $5,000. Says McAndrews, “We want you to continue to use this technology, we just want our client to get his due share. This is not a seat-of-the-pants, fly-by-night shakedown.”
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It’s Finally Come to This
McAndrews is right, it’s not a fly-by-nigh shakedown – it’s the logical next step in an out-of-control system where software patent suits pass for innovation.
As long as patent suits are confined to the tech industry, the odds of meaningful change to the patent system seem extremely small. Suits between tech giants like Google and Oracle are considered part of the cost of doing business. Suits by tech giants against smaller players are too valuable a tactic for companies to pass up.Suits against practicing tech companies by patent trolls that are non-practicing entities (NPEs) are seen as a hassle, but defensible.
In short, while there’s a lot of hang-wringing about patents in the tech industry, it’s not well-known outside. The dangers of software patents are only just starting to be talked about in mainstream media.
The Trolls Are Coming, The Trolls Are Coming!
But now, patent trolls are starting to branch out to other businesses. This is a good thing – because at some point, we’ll have to hit a tipping point where it’s blatantly obvious how badly the system needs to be reformed.
If the patent trolls confine themselves to the tech industry, it’ll take another decade for serious reform. If the patent trolls start hitting hotel chains, small businesses and other non-tech companies en masse they might just trigger the kind of public outrage that we need to effect change.
Right now, Innovatio says it won’t be targeting individuals – maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Over on ZDNet, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says “You may open your mail sometime soon to find a demand for a three-figure licensing fee for your use home Wi-Fi use.”
This is the best possible thing that could happen. I know, it sounds crazy – software patent suits are exactly what we don’t want more of, right? Ideally, yes. But the software patent threat has been growing unrestrained for years with little attention. It seems the only way we’ll have any real change is if everybody is made aware of the problem. I can’t think of a more effective way for this to happen than companies like Innovatio going after non-tech businesses hundreds at a time. Even better for a company to have the audacity to go after individuals.
Cisco and Motorola are going after Innovatio, trying to have their patents ruled invalid (PDF). Normally, I’d cheer them on – but I kind of hope they fail here. Not because Innovatio deserves to win, but because we’ve finally reached the point where the absurdity of software patents might actually get the public’s attention.
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