More patent nonsense
Friendster just got issued another patent.
Forget what its for. It was applied for on JUne 17, 2005. Can somebody explain to me how Friendster can get a patent on something everyone was doing - at the time? Whatever happened to prior art?
Seems time for somebody to countersue somebody for deceptive patent applications. No way Friendster engineers and executives, for example, could NOT have known that this was (a) obvious; (b) already in use all over the place. Just because everybody else knew it was obvious and did not bother patenting it… just because you can get some blinkered patent bureaucrat who thinks of “prior art” as strictly “patented prior art” to stamp OK on your application does not relieve you of responsibility — legal responsibility — to tell the USPTO all you know.
In this case, Friendster will probaby “graciously” donate “their technology” to the public domain and get some fawning publicity, when what they ought to get is a huge lawsuit for fraud.
The ones we have to really worry about are those, like the Acacia multimedia-over-wire patents that really do withstand prior art attacks, even though they were arguably obvious, or would have become obvious very soon as technology matured to a certain point. Obviousness is a whole lot harder to establish, and the maturity argument probably doesn’t cut much ice.
Seems time for somebody to countersue somebody for deceptive patent applications. No way Friendster engineers and executives, for example, could NOT have known that this was (a) obvious; (b) already in use all over the place. Just because everybody else knew it was obvious and did not bother patenting it… just because you can get some blinkered patent bureaucrat who thinks of “prior art” as strictly “patented prior art” to stamp OK on your application does not relieve you of responsibility — legal responsibility — to tell the USPTO all you know.
In this case, Friendster will probaby “graciously” donate “their technology” to the public domain and get some fawning publicity, when what they ought to get is a huge lawsuit for fraud.
The ones we have to really worry about are those, like the Acacia multimedia-over-wire patents that really do withstand prior art attacks, even though they were arguably obvious, or would have become obvious very soon as technology matured to a certain point. Obviousness is a whole lot harder to establish, and the maturity argument probably doesn’t cut much ice.
Seems time for somebody to countersue somebody for deceptive patent applications. No way Friendster engineers and executives, for example, could NOT have known that this was (a) obvious; (b) already in use all over the place. Just because everybody else knew it was obvious and did not bother patenting it… just because you can get some blinkered patent bureaucrat who thinks of “prior art” as strictly “patented prior art” to stamp OK on your application does not relieve you of responsibility — legal responsibility — to tell the USPTO all you know.
In this case, Friendster will probaby “graciously” donate “their technology” to the public domain and get some fawning publicity, when what they ought to get is a huge lawsuit for fraud.
The ones we have to really worry about are those, like the Acacia multimedia-over-wire patents that really do withstand prior art attacks, even though they were arguably obvious, or would have become obvious very soon as technology matured to a certain point. Obviousness is a whole lot harder to establish, and the maturity argument probably doesn’t cut much ice.