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Garbage From Apple
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Here is some prior art, curtosy of Ikea. ;-)
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @08:41PM (#9196)
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Yes, and many countries have them in a seperate patent code, which was my original statement. Look, I completely agree with you that in many countries it is different. However, I'm just noting that in many countries it is similar. As for the huge differences in customs around the world, I agree, it helps a great deal to have an open mind and leave national egotism at home. Cheers.
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How can you burn it to CD in the first place if the watermark prevents you from doing so?
--Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day; set him on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @08:57PM (#9215)
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Listen, I don't care how different countries call the four differnt categories of IP rights there are or how they group or divide them.
The point of this thread however was that somebody saw the word "patent" inside "design patent" and they looked at the trash icon and it made "click" in their mind that Apple had just patented the trash can which in their mind meant far more than it really is because they didn't consider that there is a difference between a design patent and what generally is understood when one uses the term patent.
This sort of confusion happens a lot and if the anecdotes I have been hearing from US patent attorneys are anything to go by, then having to constantly clear up arising misunderstandings can be quite annoying.
To those legal folks that is probably not unlike us Mac users having to explain all the time why the PPC at so much apparent less speed (judged by the clock rate) isn't that much slower compared to a Pentium as it may seem (aka the Megahertz myth)
At some point we get so sick of this that we start to play with the idea that we might like Apple change over to Intel or AMD, not necessarily because we really need it but because it would seem so much less of a hassle not to have to constantly fight against public perception.
The situation with them silly design patents is that in many other countries the use of different terminology (no rights - no wrongs) often helps to avoid a public misperception about design patents to arise in the first place. At the very least one could say that outside of the US the emphasis is on *design* as opposed to *patent* and that leads to fewer people confusing the two.
just my 2 cents
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @08:21PM (#9239)
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Laughing. This is your direct quote after commentiong about "you yanks" (which I, perhaps mistakenly, took to mean you're not from yankee territory):
>"Fact of the matter is that our US patent attorneys all say that they consider the term "design patent""
So in context, after you said (in a rather snotty and snippy fashion I might add): that "I couldn't care less what you do to the English language, I can sit back patiently and wait another 10 or 15 years for it is an acceptable excusable for a country with a Spanish speaking majority (which the US will have by then) not to master the English language so well."
I took that to mean you had some US attorneys near by. Apparently I was wrong. Mea culpa.
Of course that doesn't change that you are wrong that a design patent is not a patent, and it just helps show you for the great guy you are.
As for US attorneys thinking that design patents might be better under some other rubrick or term, doesn't change what it is. Here in the US and in many nations abroud, it is a design patent. And, not all US attorneys think design patents should fall under some rubric, and I doubt even a majority do. That's not the case with the attorneys I know, or the law professors I talk with for that matter. Certainly opinions can and do differ. US attorneys also philosophize and ruminate that software and business method patents deserve their own catagory, and terms, and nomenclature. That doesn't change the reality. No matter what "you" or others think it "should" be, you are wrong in the here and now. And snooty to boot.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday March 05, @04:30AM (#9242)
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> The thread that starts around this level and goes on for quite alot of posts heads off into argueing
> about international semantics VERY quickly and should probably just be skipped.
>
> Thanks.
Thank you too. I absolutely agree. The article along with this thread should be deleted. That's the whole point. The article should have never made it onto MacSlash in the first place. Somebody, totally misunderstood what it was Apple did there and made a story out of nothing. It ***almost*** amounts to trolling.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday March 05, @04:22AM (#9267)
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You are mistaken to believe this is about rights and wrongs.
Just read this post from a guys called Dan:
http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=03/03/04/1928207&cid=28
keywords: "in the context of this discussion"
Anyway, I don't care what you think or what kind of vulgar language you want to throw at me. Go ahead, it doesn't touch me.
The only thing I do care about is when articles are being published that make a story out of nothing and ordinary folks get the wrong idea. This is what this whole thread is about. Someone posted an article without knowing what they were writing about. Apple protecting the "visual appearance" [note this is the language the USPTO uses] of some icon is not something that should be published as "Apple patents the trash can" because people get the wrong idea as some of the posts here have shown.
There is a word for this sort of thing: SENSATIONALISM
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday March 05, @12:42PM (#9320)
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If a design PATENT is not a patent, then BJ's are not sexual relations. The originator probably is a dooshbag. But you're a moron for not being able to comprehend a simple term.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @04:00PM (#28313)
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More Interesting patent at macrumors - Speech Recognition improvements
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @03:58PM (#28315)
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A deisgn patent is a patent. There are several types of patents. A utility patent, a plant patent, and a design patent. All are patents. They claim different things, but you have your terminology wrong. You would be correct to say that a design patent is not a utility patent. But you are incorrect to say a design patent is not a patent. The huge bulk of the united states code (USC) says youre wrong. Read 35 USC. As for what the claims limit you from doing, that's a whole other topic, and you may well have an excellent point. But you are wrong, a design patent is a patent.
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I have some faith that they'll use a DRM technology that will be acceptable since they've stated in the past that so far they haven't used any because existing ones are flawed.
Just the same I prefer eMusic's stance of no DRM. They state taht they trust their customers. I respect that and if apple is going to charge $1 per track and DRM the files I'll stick with eMusic, especially since they're planning to raise the bitrate they encode their tracks at (which is the one thing that bugs me about the service). Selection isn't bad so long as you aren't just into pop music. They have decent collections of electronic, classical, and downtempo stuff. I frankly couldn't care less about whats playing on the top 20, 50, or 100 or who just won an MTV music award. I don't really understand why people like that stuff. Or for that matter why people care about lives of celebrities. Who cares! they aren't known because they've done something great for society, they're known for their well-knowness to use a term from Boorstin's "The Image"
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @04:24PM (#28320)
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Well, here I have a challenge for you ...
Amongst all the design patents in the US, show me only one design patent that contains the words "method", "apparatus" and "invention". You won't find any.
Amongst all the design patents in the US, show me only one design patent that doesn not contain a claim over ornamental design. You won't find any.
The US has made a rather confusing choice of terminology. In the UK this thing is called design or registered design, in many other countries it is called industrial design. AFAIK, only the US and Taiwan use the word patent as part of the terminology for that instrument which protects the visual appearance of a design.
In the US patent law, because of the confusion created between the instrument which protects the visual appearance, called design patent, and the regular patent, a distinguishing modifier is used to avoid confusion and patent is also referred to by the term utility patent, which is even more confusing because in some countries a utility patent is a petty patent and in Germany the equivalent of the US design patent is called utililty pattern.
No matter what terminoloby the US chooses to use, worldwide incl. English speaking countries, when the term "patent" is used, it refers to the instrument that protects inventions and it does not refer to nor include the instrument which protects visual appearance of designs.
Another challenge for you... call up any patent attorney in the US and tell them you want to file a patent application. You won't find anybody who thinks you are talking about ornamental design. Everybody will take it for granted that you seek to protect an invention (methods, apparatus, enabling embodiment etc).
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @04:21PM (#28329)
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Shouldn't Apple be working a getting faster processors and not wasting time with silly patents? Just a thought.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @05:28PM (#28330)
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>So to answer your challenge, you can find tons of patents that don't use the word "method," "apparatus" or "invention"
you got that wrong. the challenge was not to find patent without those terms, the challenge was to find ***DESIGN***PATENTS***WITHOUT***THOSE***TERMS***, which you won't because design patents cannot claim them, they can only claim *visual appearance*.
>The fact that *you* all by yourself deem the terminology wrong,
Again, you should learn to read, because I didn't say that. I said that the terminology was unfortunate choice/chosen unwisely.
>and the US code says you are wrong.
The US code is currently being overhauled to get into line with modern patent systems in the rest of the world. That should suffice to show that it cannot be taken as a source for the ultimate truth. Fact is that I know more than a dozen US patent attorneys who all say that the term "design patent" is a misnomer and that in an ideal world it would be changed to "registered design" or something more appropriate and less confusing.
Those guys can get quite involved when they have to explain to newbie clients over and over again that a design patent is just a registered ornament and not what is generally understood by the term "patent".
Again, the US code isn't wrong, it is valid in the United States, but its choice of terminology has given rise to more confusion than clarification in terms of what a design patent is and what is is not and therefore it should be allowed to say that the terminology has been chosen unwisely.
Besides, if we are using the principle one country one vote, the US loses; if we are using the principle, one patent one vote, the US loses; if we are using the principle of one pop one vote, the US loses again. Perhaps it's time for congress to bring the terminology in line with elsewhere. They are at work on the patent code to bring it in line with other countries anyway, may as well take the opportunity and call design patents what they really are.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @04:51PM (#28332)
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You are correct in saying that in the US there is a very special and rather amusing case of a law that faces the dilemma of having to distinguish between
- the instrument that protects visual appearance
and
- the instrument that protects inventions
because they US legislators have chosen to put them both into the same code.
Because of this dilemma, the patent is referred to as utility patent in the code. However, when the USPTO issues letters of patent for a patent (the instrument which protects inventions) it just says patent and nothing else. I know this because I have a few patents on my own, not design patents, no, the real thing, and it says "patent" and "patent no."
On the other hand, when you check out the USPTO's database for design patents, you will see it says "design patent" and "design patent no.".
Further, when patent attorneys and patent litigation courts talk about patents, they refer, like the rest of us, to the instrument that protects inventions. If they talk about design patents, then they use the term "design patent".
There is almost never any situation where you have to clarify what you mean when you say "patent". If it is not further qualified, it is automatically taken to mean the instrument which protects inventions.
So by all practical means, even with a US bias applied, the meaning of the word patent is an instrument that protects inventions.
Making a claim to the contrary like you do, simply because of a qualifier in the US code, would imply that such a qualifier was necessary to make the distinction which it is not. The general practise is that patent alone is sufficient to refer to the instrument that protects inventions. Thus riding on the principle that the US code uses a qualifier and therefore the English language meaning should be neglected in favour of using the qualifier, that is nothing less than splitting hairs my friend.
After all, the whole point was that the OP of this article here got all excited about a design patent granted to Apple and the reason for this was that the OP did get confused about the word patent in the term "design patent" and did not see that it was merely a claim over an ornamental design and not what he had obviously believed to be a "real patent", that which is generally meant when the word patent is used without a qualifier ;-)
The fact that the US is pretty much alone in the world (and there are about 120+ countries with patent systems) with this use of terminology should also be considered food for thought.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @05:51PM (#28334)
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Design patents offer protection over look-n-feel and UI to a level not afforded by other non-patent forms of Intellectual Property (i.e., you can get strong protection form utility patents of course). It affords more UI protection than copyright without the full expense of filing a utility patent, so it has become a valuable form of IP unto itself.
You are trying to obfuscate the issue, and I did not ever make a claim about what the average person thinks of when you say "patent." *YOU* made the claim that a design patent was not a patent. I pointed out you are wrong. You now are changing goal posts and saying well most people mean utility patent when they say patent, which may be true enough. The fact is, it's not splitting hairs. And you were wrong, plain and simple.
As for foreign countries supporting design patents, you're wrong too. I won't purport to know the laws of over 200+ countries, but I do know that many do have design patent, including Japan and many in Europe (including the UK and Tiawan). Most associate them with their patent laws. There is even a notion of an international design patent, read here. Of course, some countries call it by other names too.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @06:19PM (#28337)
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>That's not so. Other countries use the term design patent as well
This may seem so if you don't speak the local language because the patent office may chose US terminology for their English version web pages.
The native terminolgy in most countries we have been filing in does not use the word patent for the local equivalent of the design patent. In most of them it's just called "design".
>As for foreign countries supporting design patents, you're wrong too.
I don't quite understand what you mean by that. What is it that you say is wrong?
Anyway, whatever your perception may be, many countries have a legal instruments to protect the visual image of an ornamental design. In other words, they have something that is equivalent to what the US calls design patent. However, they typically do not use the word patent for the term they use to call this.
>Of course some countries call it by other names too.
In the local language most do not use the word patent for designs and they do not consider designs to be a type of patent, they consider them -well- designs.
The trend outside of the US generally is that there are three categories: designs, patents and trademarks.
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From looking at the DRM patent, it appears to be based on watermarking. It appears that this DRM situation could be trivially avoided by merely burning the offending file to CD, then ripping back to MP3, or finding a non-DRM enabled MP3 player.
However, these theoretical MP3s may contain "malformed" headers that render them unplayable to regular, non-DRM enabled MP3 players, and untranslatable into WAV format by unauthorized CD burners. Some kind of proprietary file format containing MP3 encoded binary data in some manner.
Regardless, once you've got it in CDDA on a disc, it's gone, except possibly tracking through the watermark who was the one who distributed the file. And even then, a watermark can be masked by another watermark.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @04:28PM (#28353)
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yeah, because we know Apple only has enough people to perform one task at a time, and also can make IBM mass produce their upcoming processors before their scheduled release!
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday March 05, @07:09PM (#28359)
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Well, after you just spent most of your day and about 20000 words just to make the point that US patent law uses misleading terms, I don't think you have any right to bitch.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @06:55PM (#28366)
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Are you seriously trying to tell me that you cannot distinguish between "wrong" and "unwisely chosen due to giving rise to confusion" ???
1-bit resolution is the best you can do?
Anyway, I couldn't care less what you Yanks call your stuff. I couldn't care less what you do to the English language, I can sit back patiently and wait another 10 or 15 years for it is an acceptable excusable for a country with a Spanish speaking majority (which the US will have by then) not to master the English language so well.
Fact of the matter is that our US patent attorneys all say that they consider the term "design patent" a QUOTE misnomer UNQUOTE. So, that characterisation is not mine. From where I come from, you typically don't refer in such blunt terms to friendly countries' stuff, you'd say "rather confusing" or "unfortunate terminology" etc. But it just so happens that no matter which US patent attorney I have talked to, they would always call the design patent a "misnomer".
If you think I made this up myself, go point your browser at some of the intellectual property related Usenet/Google groups and you will find plenty of posts there where US patent attorneys (with their verifiable license numbers in the signature) openly get agitated about the term design patent and how they call it misnomer, how they say it should be called differently.
Don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself. Post some bait in alt.inventors or misc.intellectual-property and ask why a design patent is called a design patent. You will get plenty of US patent attorneys telling you how unhappy they are about this terminology and that they would rather have it changed.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @07:19PM (#28372)
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Design patents abroad very often fall under the the foreign patent office, and patent laws. The previous links attest to this.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @07:35PM (#28373)
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Look where the icon is located, that's not the dock, it's the desktop!
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @07:36PM (#28374)
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>US attorneys abroad
show me where I said they were abroad
then again, post your request for an opinon on alt.inventors and misc.intellectual-property, the responses you will get will mostly come from US patent attorneys currently practising in the US and they usually post their (verifiable) license numbers in their signature.
Chance is you won't find a soul that will not tell you that they think the term is misleading and ought to be changed. Try it.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @06:06PM (#28376)
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>>The fact that *you* all by yourself deem the terminology wrong,
>Again, you should learn to read, because I didn't say that. I said that the terminology was unfortunate choice/chosen unwisely.
"I said that the terminology was...chosen unwisely". Let's see, "YOU" are the object, and believe that the "terminology" was "chosen unwisely." In other words, you deemed the terminology wrong.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @05:59PM (#28382)
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No, what you failed to do is admit you were wrong when you said that a design patent was not a patent. You must have agreed with the Clintonian notion that BJ's do not count as sexual contact. :)
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @05:57PM (#28388)
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>Shouldn't Apple be working a getting faster processors and not wasting time with silly patents?
Are you serious or are you kiddin'?
Designs, patents and trademarks represent intellectual property, even "silly" ones that protect nothing more than the appearance of the trash icon. Intellectual property represents investment of resources and (hopefully) competitive advantage.
Having intellectual property stolen, can be as bad as or worse than having physical assets stolen and therefore it is very well worth protecting.
I can already see the protest posts on MacSlash when M$ copies the trash can icon from OSX. And I am sure everybody would get very angry if M$ could just get away with it because Apple didn't protect themselves well enough ;-)
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @05:07PM (#28390)
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while talking about design patents ...
> although the US does not follow a first to file model, but a first to invent model, so it does not establish when something was used/invented first, simply by the filing itself
be careful here. an ornamental design is not an invention and hence it cannot be invented. If it cannot be invented there is little point in mixing this up with the first to invent principle of patents (those instruments which protect inventions).
For a design patent, it would therefore be first use of the design, similar in nature to the principles which apply to trademarks.
For this and other *similarities in nature* ornamental designs and the instruments which protect them are often regulated under the trademark laws in other countries, which is not to say that registered designs are trademarks, they are not. However, they are closer in nature to trademarks than they are to patents.
It's a pity congress chose the US terminology so unwisely.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @05:32PM (#28392)
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>All of the people saying "a design patent is a patent" are incorrect in the context of this discussion.
Thank you. That is what I had tried to explain but obviously failed to achieve.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @05:41PM (#28393)
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wasting time with silly patents? it seems to me that in an age of information silly patents are basically "real estate". they are equity and should be defended as such.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @05:45PM (#28395)
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" There are utility patents, plant patents, design patents. All are patents."
Um, that's only so in the US. Readers from overseas might get confused by this.
Speaking of confusion ... at the EPO the utility patent is called "patent" and the design patent is called "utility pattern" IIRC ;-)
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday March 05, @05:03PM (#28400)
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Setting aside for a moment that this is a design patent and ergo as common as mud, why on earth would you blame Apple for this? They are legally... LEGALY required to do anything they can to make a profit for their shareholders. As a shareholder I damn well expect them to use the tools and methods provided to them by the government to do so. If they don't they are negligent and someone else will. Blame the patent system. Hell, blame capitalism. But don't blame Apple for doing their legal duty.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @03:49PM (#28405)
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>Um, design patents are part of the patent law
that doesn't mean that a design patent is the same as a patent.
The scope of a design patent is the ornamental design. Look at the claims section in a design patent. It will always read "claimed is the ornamental design of ...."
The scope of a patent (as opposed to a design patent) is methods and apparatus which describe and invention, some machine, some process, how something works. Look at the claims section of a patent (as opposed to a design patent). It will always read something like "claimed is a method whereby a shaft driven by an engine connected through a clutch ..." etc etc
In other words, what Apple claims here is the graphical representation of the trash can, not a method of using a trash can icon and drag'n'drop as a means to get rid of files you no longer need.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @03:36PM (#28410)
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Um, design patents are part of the patent law (it's not part of the trademark code). Check out 35 USC 171. You have your terminology wrong. A design patent in deed is a patent. Now a design patent is not a utility patent; and probably what you mean.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @03:40PM (#28412)
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Then explain why they are part of the same patent law/code? law (it's not part of the trademark code). Check out 35 USC 171. You have your terminology wrong. A design patent is a patent. Now a design patent is not a utility patent; and probably what you mean.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @03:35PM (#28415)
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> It is a patent. A design patent.
Nonsense. A patent is a patent and a design patent is a design patent. The two have nothing to do with each other. A design patent is not a patent.
Unfortunate choice of terminology, likely to be confusing, yes, but nevertheless it's not the same thing.
> And it can be both copyrighted
you cannot "copyright something", a copyright is a right that exists automatically.
>The design patent is not just for the display or desktop, but it is limited just for the icon.
That doesn't matter much, you could as well file a design patent for a background image or a mouse cursor or any other graphical element of a GUI.
What matters is that the scope of a design patent is the ornamental design and nothing else.
The scope of a patent on the other hand is the methods and apparatus that characterise an invention.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @05:54PM (#28416)
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>be careful here. an ornamental design is not an invention and hence it cannot be invented. If it cannot be invented there is little point in mixing this up with the first to invent principle of patents (those instruments which protect inventions).
Um you be careful. You brought up that the filing date was used to establish use, and I brought up that is not necessarily so. In the US you can file for a design patent up to one year after you've begun using it.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @05:56PM (#28417)
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @04:10PM (#28427)
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You are absolutely correct. Thank you for the clarification.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @03:24PM (#28439)
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>It's not a misnomer. It is a design patent. That is what the PATENT office likes to call it.
You are missing the point. The term "design patent", that which the US patent office uses, is a misnomer, because a design patent has nothing to do with a regular patent.
In brief: design patent != patent
The nature of a design patent is that of a registered ornamental design. That's what I meant by "misnomer". If you don't like "misnomer", you may want to consider "unfortunate choice of terminology".
AFAIK only the USPTO uses this rather confusing terminology. Confusing, because most people tend to confuse this with regular patents, which it isn't.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 04, @03:05PM (#28445)
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Um, no. It is a patent. A design patent. Read it in the link. And it can be both copyrighted and design patented. The design patent is not just for the display or desktop, but it is limited just for the icon. From the patent itself it says that the display is specifically not claimed:
"The single FIGURE is a front view of a user interface for computer display showing our new design. The broken line drawing of the computer display, window and the contour surrounding the user interface is for illustrative purposes only and forms no part of the claimed design."
In otherwords they patented the design of the trash can (that's the only part that isn't in broken lines). Read the story or the links before you go on a rant next time.
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