DEAD STEVE JOBS kills Apple bounce patent from BEYOND THE GRAVE The late Apple baron Steve Jobs has critically wounded one of his company's key "bounce to update" related patents in Europe. A German court has nixed a photo-gallery app design, filed by Apple in June 2007, after a video of Jobs demonstrating the software with the rubber-band bounce effect five months earlier was deemed prior …
That's covered in the link at the end - in the US you get 12 months grace period from when you first start shouting about your new invention to get your patent in. In the EU there's no such grace period and you need to get it patented before showing the world.
Both systems make sense in my mind - the US system protects the innovator a bit more, but the EU system means copiers don't have to wait to see if a patent is filed before starting to make copies.
I don't support software patents in any form, but I agree, it's a bit strange that an inventor demonstrating their invention can actually be cited for prior art against their own invention.
It's almost as if an actual physical working product doesn't even factor into the equation. Why, someone could just come up with an idea and as long as they had a stamped and dated bit of paperwork - then all the rewards of hard work that goes into actually inventing something physical and tangible - belongs to them.
According to a Patent Attorney acquaintance, it gets better than this. He could have demo'd the phone, making no reference whatsoever to the bouncy-bounce-back action, not even showing it, and it would still count as prior art if it could be proved that it was in the software load of the phone he demo'd.
In the US patents could be applied for within 12-months of disclosure. In the rest of the world the patent must be applied for before disclosure. Once you've told the world about your great idea it cannot be patented. As I understand it, the US patent system now works this way as well for new patents.
Nope. They should have filed before showing it in public - it's their own stupid fault.
Someone shows off an idea before patenting it, especially something as trivially-copyable as this, people then incorporate it into their own products. The "innovation" wasn't protected at the time they gave everyone else the idea - sounds like they didn't really care about keeping the idea to themselves much.
>Didn't the judges just destroy the patent system?
Of course not. As the article already noted, this happened because of the differences between the US and European patent systems. In Europe, you must file for the patent first, and only then you can publish your idea to the world (of course you can talk about it within your company). In the US, you can shout it from the rooftops and still have a year to get it to the patent office.
I think (for europe anyway) that if you have an idea you patent it before you release a high profile product that uses the idea.
Once you have released a product using the idea without patenting it then anyone is free to use that idea but will be unable to patent it as their own
I'm struggling to understand this judgement. If I have a good idea, it can be cited as prior art to stop me patenting it. Didn't the judges just destroy the patent system?
No, the patent system should be well understand and corporate patent depts regularily drum it into engineers.
Basically, anything that is patented must not be disclosed to anyone (other than under NDA etc) before it is filed. If you tell someone about it (without NDA in place) then it becomes public and can no longer be patented. So before you do a (public) demo of your new idea you need to get the patent filed (i.e. you need to lodge the info about the invention at the patent office .... they will then decide if it is actually patentable before granting it). The exception is the USA where you are allowed to file within 1 year of first disclosure - hence in this case Apple may have a US patent but not able to get patent anywhere else.
I think it just means that if you have a good idea, make sure you've got the patent application well and truly lodged *before* you show it off to world + dog; presumably if you don't you're considered to have made it public domain. Just guessing, though.
No idea how you managed to get downvoted just for asking the question, btw.
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The key is that you have to patent it _before_ you demonstrate it - the patent application has to be the first publication of the idea, otherwise it's considered to be "out there" without being patented, and thus freely copyable. Therefore you've created your own prior art and can't patent the idea later. Quite sensible really, otherwise you could let people come up with products using an idea - a patent search would show up no matches, then patent it and demand royalties.
it means that once a idea has been published without a patent application being made, it is not patentable any more.
So no, you can still patent your invention, just don't publish it before you write the patent application.
I suppose this is one way to ensure that people are not showing off some good idea first and than try to cash in from others, that started to implement it before the patent was even written.
Nope. If you have a good idea, you have to very careful about who you tell and under what circumstances until you have applied for a patent. Any publication of what you wish to patent, by you or anyone else, before you start the application process can be cited as prior art.
IIRC, this includes patent applications. A patent application is publishing the idea. If you have made an error in your application and you try to re-apply, technically it would be invalid due to the prior art of your initial application.
The point is that in Europe you have to patent something BEFORE making it public, in the USA I believe this is not so much the case. Thus Steve Jobs demoing it to all and sundry made it public and as the idea was not yet protected by a patent, in Europe, it meant that anyone could copy it, in Europe.
This link explains it very clearly.
http://web.mit.edu/tlo/www/community/preserving_patent_rights.html
The crucial thing is that if you have a good idea and tell everyone about it publicly then in most countries other than the US, you have torpedoed yourself. In the US you have a year long grace period to patent it after that point.
er...no.
The original idea behind the patent system was a deal - the state gives you a time limited monopoly on your invention and in return you tell everyone how it's works. If how it's works is in the public domain then what's the point of giving you a monopoly?
There's a lot to criticise about how it works now (and I expect some choice examples in this thread) but the underlying idea is sound. Before patents new inventions would be kept as trade secrets the extreme case being forceps in child birth which one family kept under wraps for 150 years.
Maybe because as a great money spinner you could create something, demonstrate it to the world without a patent. Wait for everyone to also use it (you've published it to the world of course) and then when there is significant uptake patent it and sue.
Not destroy the company. actually make little difference except more innovation and competition. Especially from startups.
The current "to easy for rich people to enforce a trivial patent" situation harms innovation and only helps the big company bottom line a little. Actually some companies spend so much on patenting that if only genuine patents granted they might save more than they would lose in competition.
> If properly applied, the concept of "prior art" would destroy many large companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google because they simply commercialize ideas that other people
Improving an invention does not require hijacking that invention and effectively stealing it from those that actually invented it.
In 2013, one simply doesn't need a 20 year monopoly in order to make money off of a better mousetrap. The entire market moves much too fast. Progress happens far too quickly and an invention may become obsolete before anyone successfully clones it.
The rule is that you must file for a patent before you tell anyone else about the idea. Apple didn't do this, he told the whole world about the idea then waited five months before filing his application.
The logic behind the rule is to prevent someone sharing an idea, perhaps even encouraging them to implement it, then snaring them in a litigation trap by filing for the patent once they are about to bring a product to market.
If you tell people without first having applied for a patent, the law assumes that you are happy for others to copy the idea - you've had a good idea and want everyone to benefit from it without seeking to make a profit from it.
I remember my computer A level course work on a Commodore PET, it was a stock control program, written partly in BASIC and partly machine code, to speed some things up and make other bits more accessible for future development.
The parts screen was a twenty line affair with headers and footers taking up the other 4 lines and scrolled like a dream, until that is, it got to the end of the list, where it appeared to bounce, much to my annoyance.
I eventually fixed this "flaw", handed it in, got the grades and moved on. Boy do I now regret binning my work, as I beat Apple to the bounce by some thirty years.
Did he really say that iPhone ran on OSX and that it runs Desktop quality applications? :-) joking aside though, you should watch that video and give Apple just a little round of applause and a bit of credit. When you see the things in the video that seemed magic only 5 years ago and are now commonplace.
Patents are misused though and the idea of patenting a bounce effect is just nonsense. Apple should have patented a lot more of the technology rather than the minor things like a bouncing screen.
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