Comments on: Trolls in the BlackBerry patch

By: Overlawyered

Overlawyered — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 11:53:14 +0000

BlackBerry dispute settles for $612M

“Although the U.S. Patent Office recently invalidated most of the patents at issue in the dispute, NTP still had the right to appeal. However, RIM was put in a tough position because [Judge] Spencer didn’t…

By: markm

markm — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 12:10:11 +0000

It’s almost harmless, unless Volfson uses the patent to fraudulently attract investors. It might not even be conscious fraud. I forget the name, but around 50 years ago there was a man who built a machine that spun unbalanced weights around at high speed. It kind of hopped up and down, but never went anywhere – however, since the hopping made it impossible to measure the weight while the thing was running, the inventor convinced himself, and a few other people, that it was getting lighter and he was on the way to antigravity.

I think the biggest mistake ever made in patent law was when the PTO stopped requiring a working model. That would not only weed out frauds or self-deception like this, but more importantly it would have forced people like Lemelson to spend their time perfecting a few useful inventions, rather than guessing what other people might invent and filing broad patents for things they would never create themselves.

By: dick king

dick king — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 17:15:50 +0000

In all fairness, it’s almost harmless to allow a patent for something that doesn’t have any reasonable chance of being useful, since it’s unlikely to be a blocking patent.

For more damaging is when a patent is granted despite prior art that is common knowledge among the practitioners in the field, or that should be dropped for failing to meet the non-obviousness test.

-dk