I'm sure Apple obtained a non-infringement opinion from their lawyers if for no other reason than to avoid willful infringement, which comes with triple damages. But to say a patent would never have been granted if the tech existed is not necessarily true, since the Patent Office often grants patents that should not have been granted in the first place. These patents often don't really get tested for validity until litigation when big money is thrown at the patent review. It's just a fact of life that the Patent Office sometimes gets things wrong. Maybe not the case here, but so far a lot of Masimo's patent claims have already been invalidated as not being new and non-obvious inventions.
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Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 No Longer Available From U.S. Online Store
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"Hi, I'm Tim Cook. Name a number between 1 and 5 billion and then put a dollar sign in front of it."
Then see you in court....eventually they have to FRAND....the US government cannot and will not allow the world's largest tax piñata to suddenly have to remove functionality from a device that brings more in taxes in a year than this patent holder brings in two years of rev.
It's patently absurd. They will eventually have to license it to Apple....or Apple finds a way around the patent, thus negating its intended purpose. And the patent does have a time limit. What happens when their patent runs out? Apple and Google and Samsung can then just copy it legally....which, again....begs the question of why a non-market leader is bullying a company 1000x its size on a patent they could have just sold to Apple....
This is ridiculous and further proof to me that patents are no longer necessary and only hinder innovation. Keurig held the coffee industry back for a decade because K-Cups were patented. Now that the patent has expired, Keurig actually has to compete and fight for every dollar rather than the Monopoly of the Patent, which is a market tyranny from an older time where you did not have a global market.
And here's my counterargument for anyone who wants to come in and defend this absurdity: Android.
What if the Multi-Touch patent held and Android was barred from the market because Apple held the exclusive patent on Multi-Touch? What if that was legally feasible? We don't have the Open Handset Alliance and thousands of competing companies using a shared wedge, Android. Patents are legalized monopoly and I think they should be abolished.
At least the third time you have posted this overly simplistic solution to a complex problem, which likely will make things worse, not better. Your free market theory only works if there is perfect competition, which never happens in the real world.
A copyright example is easy to understand: if you write a book and have no intellectual property protection, then someone else can publish the book for a fraction of what you would need to recover your costs and they don't have to pay you for your work at all. It is impossible to compete with the copier.
Patents are the equivalent for inventions. You can't compete with someone who copies your work and pays you nothing for it.
The solution is more nuanced, but abolishing intellectual property rights would be a disaster especially when you consider than a full third of the U.S. GDP is driven by IP.
Multi-Touch was patented, a court invalidated it, Google ripped Apple off. What was the point of patenting it?
That's not reductive or simplistic. Apple spent the time and effort developing the technology and then was ripped off.
1985....MicroSoft ripped off Apple and Apple didn't have a patent on the Desktop GUI, as it was technically a Xerox PARC technology. Either way, Apple ripped off Xerox PARC and MicroSoft ripped Apple off.
Patenting it became useless.
You can't patent something that is blatantly obvious. There's only two real non-invasive ways to detect SpO2 levels in the blood. You're telling me you can patent both of the two ways and get pissy when someone wants to challenge you in the market because you have a patent?
I'm not telling you that - I'm saying abolishing patents is not going to fix the problem.
If the patents were found to be invalid, then the way the invention was claimed was not novel and non-obvious. Sometimes the Patent Office gets it wrong and grants the patent, but then it gets sorted out later in litigation. It happens all the time. Maybe the patent owner fixes the claims, or maybe they lose the patent.
But if an invention is truly novel and non-obvious, and the claims reflect that accurately, then the invention is patentable and that invention is the intellectual property of the inventor (or assignee).
By the way, the entire reason for the limited monopoly is to give the inventor a chance to recover their costs and an incentive to innovate rather than copy. The term is 20 years for utility and plant patents and 15 years for design patents. That should be enough time for, say Keurig (your example above), to recover their development costs before having to directly compete with a copying competitor.
If they are not innovating (but instead copying), then presumably the development costs are low because someone else already did the hard work of figuring out a technical solution.
You say there are only two non-invasive ways of detecting SpO2, and maybe there are, but how do we really know? Maybe someone will figure out a new, third way, and it costs millions of dollars to figure it out. Shouldn't they be able to get a patent for that if it is truly innovative?
I am against rewarding people with 10 years of monopolistic market control because they were able to patent it.
The light bulb wasn't invented by Edison, he was the first to Patent it. Keurig didn't invent coffee, they just invented a mass produced coffee inside of a filter. It's obvious when you think about it. But no one could make a K-Cup except for Keurig for 10 years. Same with Yeti.
Back in the 1800s and early 1900s, yes they make sense to protect hard work. Now, patent portfolios are just legal weapons. Google bought Sony Ericsson not to make a new product but protect itself in the lawsuit happy world of patent litigation where you can sue someone for abridging a patent you have on a product that is not even in the same space.
This company suing Apple doesn't make a smartwatch. They make advanced medical equipment for the healthcare sector and were worried that over time the AppleWatch may become used in a healthcare setting and replace their product.
But instead of licensing the patent fairly under FRAND, or selling it, or selling their company to Apple or a conglomerate run by Google, Apple, and Microsoft, etc, they sued.
It is their right to sue as it is their right to protect their property. Maybe not a smart business decision but still within their rights. You may disagree with it on a case-by-case basis because some of the patents are unseemly or invalid, but abolishing intellectual property rights altogether as you suggest is not going to make things better, it will make things worse because no one will have any rights to their work no matter how innovative it is. People still work hard now as they did a hundred years ago.
So what if no one else could make a K-Cup? Someone should have just come up with a better design that didn't infringe Keurig's patent. Isn't that the thrust of your competition argument? May the best product win?
If you want to get into patents and theft, spread spectrum radio..The idea was patented by Hedi Lamarr, to solve the problem of remote control of torpeodos.. She figured out a way to use radio, and rapidly changing the frequency, but finding a buyer of this idea, no one, it eventually lapsed, and years later was "re-discovered" and now we have blutooth, which uses spread spectrum radio, and a narrow "junk" band of radio that was basically useless...
Apple then grabbed this idea, "airdrop" this is just a fancy blutooth application, that uses a GUI to send and receive data, under the guise of being safe... But the rub is, airdrop is not a safe technology.. Apple use the idea of spread spectrum radio in a certain way, unwilling to share so that Android's system cannot directly interface with airdrop...But blutooth to blutooth works, but not always, for example Apple Pro Max, 2023, cannot send from the phone to the 2006 Mac Pro via airdrop, Apple security paranoia prevents this, but a 2022 Sammy A23 can send data to the 2006 Mac Pro via blutooth...
For me this is a good thing, for Apple egg on the face, Apple to Apple=no. Samsung to Apple=Yes.. which makes no sense, but it does to a paranoid company scared of being scammed, yet publishes open beta of almost all the code it has..Only pro apps are not open beta.. But the operating system is...Which is valuable intellectual Property IP...No doubt patented at some point.. So if IP is patented, why publish open beta??
Apple then grabbed this idea, "airdrop" this is just a fancy blutooth application, that uses a GUI to send and receive data, under the guise of being safe... But the rub is, airdrop is not a safe technology.. Apple use the idea of spread spectrum radio in a certain way, unwilling to share so that Android's system cannot directly interface with airdrop...But blutooth to blutooth works, but not always, for example Apple Pro Max, 2023, cannot send from the phone to the 2006 Mac Pro via airdrop, Apple security paranoia prevents this, but a 2022 Sammy A23 can send data to the 2006 Mac Pro via blutooth...
For me this is a good thing, for Apple egg on the face, Apple to Apple=no. Samsung to Apple=Yes.. which makes no sense, but it does to a paranoid company scared of being scammed, yet publishes open beta of almost all the code it has..Only pro apps are not open beta.. But the operating system is...Which is valuable intellectual Property IP...No doubt patented at some point.. So if IP is patented, why publish open beta??
To get from radio to Airdrop as a patent explanation and compare that to Bluetooth is rich. Thanks for the chuckle.
Topic of this discussion is not radio. Nor Bluetooth. Not airdrop. Not that all three had anything in common other than being wireless anyway but even that is way off topic. Whataboutism is derailing the conversation.
Actually perfectly on point, this thread is about Apple in a dispute about someone's IP, I explained how someone's IP lapsed, and the history of how Apple uses IP in a certain way, airdrop is bluetooth technology..
IP is very important, it is what drives the economy, we need IP in all its forms, but that cannot be for an extended period, 10 years and that is the end of your ownership, 10 years is a very long time, put it another way, the USA went from an economy that required the horse, to an economy that used the car in 20 yrs.. So having IP for something horse related, 20 years later, seems a bit pointless..
Look at Apple and what tech has evolved in 20 yrs, or how it has not.. Apple is actually very slow, the iphone released this week in 2007, and it is basically the same shape, lacking in certain features, $50 phones have had for decades.. SD cards, and 3.5mm headphone sockets...
Back to the thread, the fact Apple used someone's IP, at some point questions internally to Apple INC should have been asked.. How did Apple let this happen? Did Mr Cook know that someone at Apple approved the sale of a product without the all the legal aspects covered in writing??
Strange that Mr Cook is not looking through the jobs wanted in the local fishwrap...
IP is very important, it is what drives the economy, we need IP in all its forms, but that cannot be for an extended period, 10 years and that is the end of your ownership, 10 years is a very long time, put it another way, the USA went from an economy that required the horse, to an economy that used the car in 20 yrs.. So having IP for something horse related, 20 years later, seems a bit pointless..
Look at Apple and what tech has evolved in 20 yrs, or how it has not.. Apple is actually very slow, the iphone released this week in 2007, and it is basically the same shape, lacking in certain features, $50 phones have had for decades.. SD cards, and 3.5mm headphone sockets...
Back to the thread, the fact Apple used someone's IP, at some point questions internally to Apple INC should have been asked.. How did Apple let this happen? Did Mr Cook know that someone at Apple approved the sale of a product without the all the legal aspects covered in writing??
Strange that Mr Cook is not looking through the jobs wanted in the local fishwrap...
