Gameboy70
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Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Metro Station, Hollywood and Highland
Posts: 1018 |
quote:
Originally posted by Toby
One wonders: Is NCR planning to produce a PocketPC or some other PDA soon? IMO, this is a frivilous suit that doesn't stand a chance of winning, but would potentially eat up time and money.
It's more accurate to say that it doesn't stand much of a chance at winning. It's a sucker bet, like Pascal's Wager. Last year, I interviewed someone over at British Telecom when the company was informing ISPs that it intended to collect royalties from them on the use of hyperlinks (!), which BT claims to have a patent on from 1978. The sense I got from the spokesman (although he didn't actually come out and say this; it's my inference) was that BT was fully aware that it's claim to owning hyperlinks was BS, but in the unlikely event that the claim prevailed in court, the reward was too vast (a couple of bucks from every ISP on the planet) to ignore. So if BT spent $800K -- pocket change for a company of that size -- in litigation, it's no big deal. Fortunately, there's footage of Doug Engelbardt using hypertext in the late sixties, which invalidated BT's claim.
Unfortunately, corporations are regularly encouraged to rummage through their intellectual property archives (NCR probably just rediscovered it's patent, Hoser) for new opportunites to sue others: Rembrandts in the Attic is one book that advocates this practice. IBM and AT&T, among many others, have been doing this for decades. It certainly didn't start with Amazon or NCR.
quote:
Originally posted by bkbk
Wasn't Palm mock-sued (I think the case died) on Graffiti supposedly being "stolen" from some other firm in the last year or so?
I believe you can't patent an "idea" (like a "Wallet PC," PktPC, Palm, Hand, etc.) -- just its execution. Maybe their idea for a PDA (if they had one) sucked.
I think it was IBM that sued Palm over Graffiti -- or more specifically (or broadly, depending on your point of view), character recognition. I don't remember the details of the case; only that Palm prevailed -- probably because the CR algorithms are patented by Jeff Hawkins.
As far as patenting an idea rather than its execution, that's been the whole problem of the 90s. Companies, and individuals like Bill Warman and Jeff Bezos, have deliberately designed their patents to be as broad as possible, blurring the line between an idea and its execution. You're right in theory, but in practice it takes experienced reviewers to discern the line between the acceptable and the absurd, and they usually can't. Many of these patents (like 1-click) shouldn't have been granted in the first place. But the PTO can't find enough qualified reviewers, regardless of how much they're paid (around $250K, I'm told). To be a patent reviewer, you have to have a law degree and and engineering degree, and most of the people who fall in that category have degrees in electrical engineering, not CS.
Anyway, the bottom line is that NCR's suit probably will be thrown out of court. There's prior art: the Apple Newton was based largely on Alan Kay's concept design of the Dynabook from the early seventies. The Palm is as different in size from the Dynabook as it is from "credit card size."
Vertigo has it right.
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03-15-2001 05:36 PM
Just fifteen minutes
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