scromar

This is true.

Just conjecture here, but my guess is that "Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology" means that Tesla is going to require these others who want to use the technology to obtain a license from Tesla. That license may not include a royalty payment, but you can probably bet it will require a reciprocal license (back to Tesla) of any patents of the licensee. This will ensure that Tesla cannot be sued by any of its licensees on any of their patents, and that if they try to sue Tesla, they are no longer acting in "good faith" and have breached the agreement.

I see general concept and specific implementation as being on a spectrum. If an invention is sufficiently novel/nonobvious, I believe the inventor is entitled to a patent on the general concept. However, if the invention is an incremental advance, or in a crowded field, the inventor should only be entitled to a patent on the narrower invention that is actually new, and usually this is going to be a specific implementation.

This is not to say that a patent application should not describe the invention in detail. The law requires that the patent application describe the invention in sufficient detail that one of skill in the art would be able to practice/implement the invention without "undue experimentation." This feels like the right standard to me. I believe that a software patent application that provides a functional description of the invention, even without code showing a specific implementation, that would allow a skilled programmer to implement the invention, should suffice. Whether that invention is novel/nonobvious is a separate question. The broad idea may or may not be. A narrow aspect of the idea may or may not be. You don't need actual code to figure this out.

I posted a similar comment in the author's post, but I figure I'll post it here too in case anyone finds it useful.

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I sympathize with the author's belief that many software patents are obvious, but as a practicing patent attorney I just want to point out a couple of things:

1. The patent claim copied in the post is from a published application, not a patent. It is common to file an application with broader claims, and then to narrow those claims during the process of getting the patent. Thus, art that you find based on that claim may not actually disclose or render obvious a claim that eventually issues in a patent. It is important to look at the history of the application to see how the published claim has been amended at this point.

2. Obviousness is judged as of the time of invention or application filing. Because hindsight bias is very difficult to avoid, the patent office relies on actual art that was disclosed before the invention date. The art generally must teach each and every limitation of the claim. I submit that a “photo album that groups your photos by the time they were taken” would not teach all of the limitations of the claim in the post.

Even if the inventor refuses to sign the declaration, if they have an obligation to assign and are truly an inventor, their name will appear on the face of the patent. There are procedures at the patent office for proceeding with getting a patent even when an inventor refuses to sign.

That's one of the issues though. Which patents are the "truly new" ones and which are the "trivial ones"? It seems like many software patents seem obvious in hindsight, a few years down the road, but they were not obvious at the time of invention.

That's not the right approach, because usually an employee has an obligation to assign the invention to their employer. Frequently it's not really up to the inventor whether or not a patent gets filed on a particular idea.

Also, a lot of times it is difficult to avoid hindsight bias. It may arguably seem obvious now, in 2013, but it is hard to say what would have been obvious in 2004.

Nonobviousness is judged as of the filing date, a fact that many seem to forget.

No, just all the elements of any one of the claims.

This is probably true, but remember that the single inventor has the option of publishing the invention rather than filing a patent application. The publication will then become prior art to any later filed patent application by another. The inventor may then file for a patent on the invention within a year of publication, but may have to overcome significant prior art that has arisen in intervening time (i.e., between publication and filing). For a number of reasons (that I'm not going into here) this may not be the best strategy in most, or possibly any, situations, but it does exist.

This may have been true many years ago, but today the term of a patent in the US is (with some exceptions) 20 years from filing. (See, http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2701.html)

Thanks for the feedback. I recognize that for many (all?) startups, legal issues are some of the last things that they want to have to deal with. We would make an effort to keep things interesting, brief, and pertinent. That is one of the reasons why I am looking for feedback like this.

Thanks for the feedback! Those are great ideas.

And you're right, I should have noted in the OP that the focus would be on U.S. law. However, patent law and patent issues frequently cross borders today, so international issues should certainly be part of the course.

Additional fee shifting information from a recent federal circuit ruling here:

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2012/10/should-we-move-towar...

I don't think this is true in general. Most patents I have read have had very detailed descriptions of the invention. In fact, it is to the patentee's benefit to be as detailed as possible in describing the invention. It will be harder for people to claim you didn't invent something if you have completely described it in your patent.

In contrast, what is actually claimed (that is, the bounds of the legal right to exclude that a patent grants), is typically made as broad as possible. Claims will be included that are both broad and narrow, so that if the patent is ever used in court, and the broad claims are knocked out by some new prior art, there are still narrower claims that can be asserted.

In general, the patentee should describe every version of the invention they have conceived of, in as much detail as possible, so as to support both broad and narrow claims. If the description is not specific, it is generally for lack of time or money on the part of the patentee or inventor, and it results in a weaker patent.

1. You are right, but there are both potential copyright and potential trademark infringement claims in this suit.

2. The right of publicity is recognized in many states, and may be implicated here. You could place it under the umbrella of privacy or IP. There is also potentially a claim for commercial misappropriation of his likeness.

My wife has had two-factor authentication for at least a year, she only accesses gmail from her iPod touch and the browser on her laptop, and she had this happen to her about a month ago. No recourse. It came back eventually, but apparently two-factor auth is not sufficient to prevent this issue.

The x200s does not have the keyboard in question, it has the classic thinkpad keyboard. The new keyboard is seen on some new lenovo models, most notably the thinkpad edge series.

I was ready to pay, and then it asked me to put my credit card information into a non-secure page. Looking at the page source, it looks like they use Stripe for payments. Will the credit card details be transmitted encrypted once I press the submit button, or are they transmitting the details in the clear?

You are right. The fourth paragraph does give some teeth to the agreement. However, the broad language of the second paragraph still gives the assignee a lot of wiggle room to argue that they are not breaking any promises made.

Edit: Now I think I was wrong in this reply. I did not realize that paragraph 4 of the agreement gives the inventor the right to license the patent to another party to enforce the agreement. However, the broad language of the second paragraph still gives the assignee a lot of wiggle room to argue that they are not breaking any promises made.

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I mentioned this in another thread, but it is actually simpler than that. As I read it, the twitter agreement gives all rights in the patent to the assignee, just like any other assignment, but it adds on the clause that the assignee agrees to get permission from the inventor if they want to sue offensively with the patent. In the future, if the assignee (whoever it is at that time) decides to sue offensively without the permission of the inventor, the assignee can (and indeed they have the right to, as the holder of all the rights in the patent). The inventor would then have a cause of action for breach of contract against the assignee, but who knows what that would amount to.

Basically, I doubt that a court would read the agreement in a way that prevents the future patent assignee from using the patent offensively, even without the agreement of the inventor.

Edit: I was wrong here, see the reply below.

No, the inventors don't have the right to license the patents to whomever is being sued. The twitter agreement gives all rights in the patent to the assignee, just like any other assignment, but it adds on the clause that the assignee agrees to get permission from the inventor if they want to sue offensively with the patent. In the future, if the assignee (whoever it is at that time) decides to sue offensively without the permission of the inventor, the assignee can (and indeed they have the right to). The inventor would then have a cause of action for breach of contract against the assignee, but who knows what that would amount to.

Clarification to my reply above: I meant to say "opening statements", and "closing arguments", not the other way around. This is what they are are actually called, I'm not sure why I wrote it the other way. I hope this clarifies my meaning a little.

During opening arguments, the lawyers are not supposed to argue. In other words, they are only supposed tell the jury what the evidence is going to show. However, there is an art to this, and there is obviously an element of persuasion in the way the evidence is presented. Also, for various reasons, the opposing counsel may not object to possibly argumentative statements.

During closing statements the lawyers are free to argue that the evidence should be interpreted a certain way, but you are basically correct that the jury should use their own judgment based on the facts presented. Yes, a persuasive lawyer is worth a lot!

As to point 2, there are exceptions and nuances, but basically the parties CANNOT present things that are not admissible evidence. During opening arguments the parties can use items that will eventually be admitted into evidence, and the email is definitely one of those things. The parties have already argued extensively over whether the email should be admitted, and the judge has ruled that it will. Ideally, the jury never hears or sees anything that is not admissible evidence.

The author is wrong. This is not an issued patent, but rather the 18 month publication of an application submitted by Google. There is nothing significant about this.

My concern is whether the bulbs flicker in the the same way that LED backlit displays do when they are set at less than full brightness. I have found this effect to be migraine inducing when the frequency is too low. Does anyone know if this type of circuitry is employed in these bulbs?