combatentropy
Veteran
Here is one of Zaxcom's patents, https://patents.google.com/patent/US7711443B1/en
It boils to: recording audio to a portable device.
If you try to read the text of the patent, you will quickly get overwhelmed. That is the intention. They write it in wordiest way they can. Not only is the main idea written wordily, but they surround it with information that is obvious, but again written in a longwinded way.
If you look, you'll see whole paragraphs devoted to such groundbreaking ideas as:
- the recorder might take batteries
- the recorder might use an analog-to-digital converter
- the recorder might use timecode
- there might be a way for separate recorders to have their timecode in sync
Zaxcom served TEAC with three of these suckers (https://insight.rpxcorp.com/litigation_documents/11010569). Guess what happens when you get served? You can't just wave them away, saying these would naturally be invented by any diligent specialist of average IQ. No, you have to show up in court. And there, these million-word patents are just the caterpillar before the full-fledged glorious butterfly that will be the days and weeks and even months of verbosity that the lawyers will spew upon the judge and the jury and you. In other words, get ready to spend a ton of money to make this go away --- and that's only if your lawyers are more deft with words than theirs.
The life-force of patents sizzles between the electrical poles of two facts:
(1) I can say simple things in a wordy way. That is to say, the entity hereafter referred to as "I" is capable of expressing various specimens of observations that have a high degree of probability of being perceived with facility by a large corpus of the population.
(2) If you work in a trade for a few years, certain ideas will come to you, even if you are of average intelligence, but nevertheless they will sound like inscrutable black magic to your mom or to someone in a different job or to a juror. For example, suppose I were to say to my mom, "You know if you increase the f-stop, then the depth of field will also increase." To her I will sound like Albert Einstein. But everyone on this forum knows that I just uttered something from Photography 101.
And so these patents go before a judge, who is like your mom in that he is not involved in building wireless radios --- although he or your mom could do so if they just spent, oh, five years studying it and working at such a company. But they haven't, so these patents sound like black magic, truly inventive.
But if the patent is upheld, then that means that no one --- and I mean no one --- besides that one company can do that one thing. All other companies are sued into submission, or oblivion, whichever comes first.
Bear in the mind the original intent of a patent was to make something "patent" --- that is, open --- to encourage some inventor to reveal his idea to the world, instead of hiding it. But if other companies are already doing what's encoded in the patent, then that means they came up with the same idea on their own. Several companies came up with the same idea on their own. I'll say that one more time, for effect: several different companies independently came up with this so-called novel idea, without reading the patent --- or even if they did read it, you can surely see that they hardly would know what it means. So it's not that they stole the idea from the patent holder. It's that the patent was obvious to any specialist in the field.
It boils to: recording audio to a portable device.
If you try to read the text of the patent, you will quickly get overwhelmed. That is the intention. They write it in wordiest way they can. Not only is the main idea written wordily, but they surround it with information that is obvious, but again written in a longwinded way.
If you look, you'll see whole paragraphs devoted to such groundbreaking ideas as:
- the recorder might take batteries
- the recorder might use an analog-to-digital converter
- the recorder might use timecode
- there might be a way for separate recorders to have their timecode in sync
Zaxcom served TEAC with three of these suckers (https://insight.rpxcorp.com/litigation_documents/11010569). Guess what happens when you get served? You can't just wave them away, saying these would naturally be invented by any diligent specialist of average IQ. No, you have to show up in court. And there, these million-word patents are just the caterpillar before the full-fledged glorious butterfly that will be the days and weeks and even months of verbosity that the lawyers will spew upon the judge and the jury and you. In other words, get ready to spend a ton of money to make this go away --- and that's only if your lawyers are more deft with words than theirs.
The life-force of patents sizzles between the electrical poles of two facts:
(1) I can say simple things in a wordy way. That is to say, the entity hereafter referred to as "I" is capable of expressing various specimens of observations that have a high degree of probability of being perceived with facility by a large corpus of the population.
(2) If you work in a trade for a few years, certain ideas will come to you, even if you are of average intelligence, but nevertheless they will sound like inscrutable black magic to your mom or to someone in a different job or to a juror. For example, suppose I were to say to my mom, "You know if you increase the f-stop, then the depth of field will also increase." To her I will sound like Albert Einstein. But everyone on this forum knows that I just uttered something from Photography 101.
And so these patents go before a judge, who is like your mom in that he is not involved in building wireless radios --- although he or your mom could do so if they just spent, oh, five years studying it and working at such a company. But they haven't, so these patents sound like black magic, truly inventive.
But if the patent is upheld, then that means that no one --- and I mean no one --- besides that one company can do that one thing. All other companies are sued into submission, or oblivion, whichever comes first.
Bear in the mind the original intent of a patent was to make something "patent" --- that is, open --- to encourage some inventor to reveal his idea to the world, instead of hiding it. But if other companies are already doing what's encoded in the patent, then that means they came up with the same idea on their own. Several companies came up with the same idea on their own. I'll say that one more time, for effect: several different companies independently came up with this so-called novel idea, without reading the patent --- or even if they did read it, you can surely see that they hardly would know what it means. So it's not that they stole the idea from the patent holder. It's that the patent was obvious to any specialist in the field.
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