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Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

It seems very strange to me that a fictional device has any relevance. It's science-fiction. Something a person could invent someday but impossible at the time and lacking any practical details of how you might invent it. We could defeat all IP laws by sitting around and engaging in a thousand-monkey style DoS attack of futuristic speculation? I feel like lots of people owe lots of money to Michael Okuda.

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IBM has a mechanism for doing exactly this. When someone submits an idea for a possible patent filing, if the idea doesn't have enough value to spend the time and money filing a patent application, the proposal will get published in a public database of ideas (with some kind of notarization), specifically to serve as prior art to make sure nobody else can patent it either.

Your DDoP attack would essentially work, at least under the current US system of things. Having an actual built and tested thing is not required.

A patent claim (a numbered thing at the back of a patent), is, at its core, a paragraph. The claim/paragraph is "the invention" and something that is captured by that claim is "an embodiment of the invention."

If you were trying to invalidate a patent claim and you had a choice between A) that exact same paragraph or B) a thing that literally did what the paragraph said, you would almost always go with "A".

The problem with B is that you have to map it to that paragraph to see if they are the same thing. That would entail substantial argument and would potentially require a jury to find the fact that B = A or B != A.

Well, the patent claims design of the device, not functionality. Although this device is "fictional" and does nothing, its design (look) matches pretty much what Apple is trying to patent, so it looks like Samsung has a valid case of prior art.

Doesn't prior art take commercial availability into consideration? (no clue if it applies to US law)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art

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