Ars Technica brings us a follow up on the Vringo case After years of hype, patent troll Vringo demolished on appeal
Today, the dream of getting rich by trading Vringo's lawsuit-driven stock is dead. A three-judge panel on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has eviscerated (PDF) Vringo's patents, ruling 2-1 that they are obvious.
...
Two judges found that the two patents, numbered 6,775,664 and 6,314,420, were invalid because the prior art, viewed as a whole, rendered them obvious.
"I/P Engine's claimed invention is obvious as a matter of law because it simply combines content-based and collaborative filtering, two information filtering methods that were well-known in the art," stated the unsigned "per curiam" majority opinion.
Retaining a query for use in filtering was "entirely predictable and grounded in common sense," they wrote. Vringo lawyers further argued that earlier systems used "ranking" rather than "filtering," but the majority found that difference unconvincing.
A concurring opinion by Circuit Judge Haldane Mayer is more strongly worded.
Vringo's patents "simply recite the use of a generic computer to implement a well-known and widely practiced technique for organizing information," wrote Mayer. "If this determination had been made in the first instance as directed by the Supreme Court, unnecessary litigation, and nearly two weeks of trial and imposition on citizen jurors, could have been avoided."
The harsh result for Vringo was bad enough that at least three other patent troll stocks also saw modest price drops.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pkrasimirov on Saturday August 16 2014, @10:16AM
Now that's about the right message to the trolls. Hit'em where it hurts -- on their profits. Shareholders, eh? All companies I've seen going down so fast always turned out to be financial pyramids.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jasassin on Saturday August 16 2014, @11:51AM
I agree. Then again, I'm against all software patents.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 16 2014, @02:55PM
It would be nice if the Patent Office in the USA stopped
granting new software patents and let the existing ones
expire naturally since they were awarded when they were
'legal'.
Years and years ago, Phil Katz (RIP) was able to patent PK-Zip.
That patent should have expired around ten years ago.
Back in 2000, RSA abandoned their public key cryptography
patent a few months before it officially expired as a
kind of marketing ploy.
And people online HATED that UNISYS gave everybody grief
over the .GIF file format with its imbeded, patented LZW
data compression techniques. So much so I remember the
protest site named 'burnallgifs' being set up. The
LZW patent is expired and is fair game now.
So yeah, the granting of software and 'with a
computer/on the internet' business method patents is
killing innovation and only making the lawyers of
patent trolls rich....
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday August 16 2014, @07:04PM
Sorry, but only about 97% of them are unreasonable. That figure may be a bit low, as it's just a ball-park estimate. I'm sure, however, that there are one or two that are reasonable. Of course, they do require implementation hardware that isn't a general-purpose computer.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hash14 on Saturday August 16 2014, @03:22PM
You know you have a problem when your patent system causes people to cheer for legitimate companies to fail. This article just highlights the absurdity of it all and how the lawyers really don't want anyone to succeed but themselves. This really shows how patents are not about progress at all and really just about lining these guys' pockets at no matter the cost. If it comes about by way of some sort of innovation, then that's great. If it comes about but inhibiting progress (if not killing it altogether), well that's fine for them too.
The problem will only be resolved when engineers and scientists (the ones doing the work) wipe themselves clean of these lawyers/parasites (the ones who only care about their own self-fulfillment).