> Violating patents is one thing, as you're only violating the concept/idea, but the implementation is still up to you
The concept/idea is not what is patented. The patent is (or should be) for the specific execution of the idea. Competitors are free to implement their feature using methods other that what is covered by the patent, even if the end result gives the exact same functionality.
> The concept/idea is not what is patented. The patent is (or should be) for the specific execution of the idea. Competitors are free to implement their feature using methods other that what is covered by the patent, even if the end result gives the exact same functionality.
IP lawyer here (EDIT: not yours, of course): That's a considerable (and potentially-dangerous) oversimplification. What matters is whether what you do comes within the claims of the patent.
Yea, this is a more correct explanation. Not a patent lawyer, but raised by one lol.
Tangentially, it gets difficult in software because a lot of patents are .... maybe overbroad in their wording of claims. Lot of ambiguous looking landmines.
This is somewhat similar to business method patents (which were curtailed a little by the SC a decade ago, but were already known to be kinda sketchy for decade+ before that). Can't patent a pure algorithm, for example.
At some point I was told to never ever look at a competitor's patents, because doing so would worsen the penalties if it turned out that our design infringed upon them. Can you confirm that's true?
Doesn't that mean that in general it is also a really bad idea to ask an engineer questions about a particular piece of tech that they patented at a previous employer, even though the specific information is a matter of public record by virtue of being explained in the patent?
Willful infringement allows for up to triple damages. The expectation is you can't do willful infringement if you're not aware of competitor's patents, and you can't be aware of them if your policy is to never look at patent documents. Or that's the idea anyway.
> The expectation is you can't do willful infringement if you're not aware of competitor's patents, and you can't be aware of them if your policy is to never look at patent documents. Or that's the idea anyway.
"Willful blindness" can be a danger (according to the Supreme Court, albeit in a different context).
Possibly a bigger danger: Your product gets kicked out of the market by an injunction (a court order to stop making, using, selling, etc.)
The case in the original article is not patents at all. Closer to copyright? Idk if it's actually copyright or some other trade secret law (? sorry, don't know much about non-patent IP law)
>The concept/idea is not what is patented. The patent is (or should be) for the specific execution of the idea.
Have you ever seen patents? They rarely cover the implementation details, or at most they're intentionally super vague about that, most of the time it's just the general idea on how the widget would work and what it does, but not how to implement it technically.
I have seen patents. The whole point is to share a method of doing something, in return for exclusive use of that method for a period of time. That's the theory, anyway.
A good example of a patent that was challenged in court and wasn’t totally invalidated is Amazon’s 1-click ordering. They patented storing customer shipping and payment details in a database so they could purchase something with a single click.
It expired in 2017 but for the period it was in force, Amazon collected millions in licensing fees.
Patents really shouldn't be granted when any competent junior engineer could have designed and implemented the feature. This method is doesn't pass the "nonobvious" test.
Batteries used to have cardboard instead of metal shells. Because of this batteries used to leak prolifically. Then an inventor patented the modern metal shelled battery. His competitors all started infringing so he sued. They claimed that the invention was "obvious." The judge ruled that it clearly wasn't obvious, because if it had been they wouldn't have been making the obnoxiously stupid cardboard batteries for so many years.
You realize the patent you’re referring to was a design patent, not a utility patent? They are very different, the former only covers look and feel, not method.
Idea is a pretty general term. I have a bunch of patents and I would describe them all as patenting an idea (for how to achieve some goal).
The implementation or execution of the idea usually takes the form of some Verilog or some C++. That is covered by copyright.
The patent is for the idea. Which is part of why I'm so opposed to patents, not just in software. In other fields, like medicine, patents are perhaps for discoveries, which are IMHO similarly valuable as the execution. But ideas aren't that valuable, or shouldn't be.
The specific execution of an idea is also an idea, though
I feel like the granularity of patents is defined more so by where the frontier of knowledge is for a given domain than the patent office (i.e. what is hard but also valuable). But, I also haven’t spent a lot of time with patents
I get these every so often and I'm curious what you mean my ignore at your own peril. My approach has been to ignore it and assume they will realize their mistake and reregister.
There's any number of risk scenarios, assign likelihood as you will :
* owner of account doesn't pay, service sells the debt to collection agency, and they come after you because it matches your email and profile.
* owner of account subscribes to something unsavoury or does something illicit, which is now traceable to you
* given email is a big part of the incredibly ridiculous and overly pervasive tracking economy and profiling of the interwebs, your profile will now be even more annoying then before and be associated with things you don't want them to be.
Etc. Or just, to your point, one day they'll realize their mistake and be mad at YOU (because people aren't generally good at taking responsibility :) and now it's a thing.
I should mention I have a dozen email accounts of various degrees of protectiveness. Thia happens, annoyingly, to my most private address that I have never ever once used for business or signed up for anything, only for friends and family. So among everything else I'm peeved that my pristine email and identity is being polutted by other crap.
And again... The reason this frustrates me, is this should.not.be.and.issue in any sane world. If you're sending verification email it should have a No option. Anything else is grossly neglible or evil or both.
I understand the problems with people using your email to register for sites. My confusion was the claim that verifying the email for some random stranger causes fewer problems than ignoring the verification email.
Over years, I've received peoples private medical bills; been subscribed to dating sites of various degrees of sketchiness; my email has been used to register with government agencies in countries of various degrees of sketchiness too; signed up for gaming, gambling, Crypto, banking, nft, investing, and so on - many things where my comfort level for mistakes and mistaken identity and Confusion and incorrect systems of record, is lower than "some kiddie signed me up for blizzard.net" :-/
24 fps is the standard for cinema because that gives the preferred look for most content, with nice looking motion blur and whatnot. High frame rate may make sense for some movies, but it's not a win for the whole industry to go 48 or 60 or higher.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with the 120 fps comment, because that is obviously not the frame rate of the finished product, so it's not the same conversation.
The whole 24 FPS thing is mostly historical. I don't like it. Nor do I like motion blur.
The 120 fps was regarding games. While movies are passive, they could still benefit immensely by doubling to 48. Not every scene in a movie is people talking and this is where 24 stops being adequate. Even YouTube has had support for 60 FPS videos for years.
I know it's not a win for the movie industry. They ought to hate it, especially the artsy types.
> “We find that three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device.”
Terrible non-answer. It's a great experience for the first three years and then the experience becomes much less great, which was the whole point of the question.
The charging cable was obviously not the leading factor when the purchase decision was made. It doesn't matter much that a different platform that runs different software and has different capabilities had models available with USB-C. Different phones for different folks and that's ok.
I think people forget that Lightning predates USB-C by a few years, and the alternative at the time (USB Micro B) was hot garbage.
Should Apple have stuck with Lightning for an entire decade? No. But any switch away from Lightning was going to cause pain for customers already invested in the ecosystem, and there was a time when that ecosystem actually made the most sense.
I think it has a bigger impact than you realize. The last iPhone I owned was the 3GS. I don't particularly like iPhone or Android; I'm hardly a fan boy. But, I'm seriously looking a iPhone 15 variant as my next phone.
I have USB-C for virtually everything and have no interest in dealing with keeping a second set of cables for one device. It's an extra expense, headache, and environmental waste I don't want. The change to USB-C makes an iPhone a viable option for me. I look forward to a refreshed SE line with USB-C as well.
I'm not thrilled about all the cables and dongles/adapters eventually going to landfills, but believe the move will be better in the long-run. I wish Apple made the move earlier.
I'm not underestimating the impact of the switch and I am as in favor of it now as I was years ago. All else being equal, I would go for the USB-C device every time.
The point I was trying to make was that an android phone having USB-C isn't the most important factor for the person who posted. This is evidenced by the fact that they purchased the iPhone anyway even though USB-C options existed.
I'm not a contract expert by any means, but this is what it says on the order page:
"The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving features evolve, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates."
The legal tension here is that the feature is called "Full Self Drive", which has the plain intuitive meaning that the car can drive itself. Adding a bunch of weasel language in the fine print may not absolve Tesla from the implicit promises it makes with the name.
> The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers
The fact that you are able to activate and use FSD (albeit not always well), implies, in Tesla's own words, that they've done this (otherwise it wouldn't be available for activation and use).
> as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions
These are the real weasel words, and Tesla likes to use them regularly, to imply pretty heavily to their fans that "this all works, but pesky regulators are keeping it out of your hands".
> The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions.
In other words, you can't rely on this until if becomes perfect. Which is meant to imply it is already almost perfect, but upon careful reading could also mean it doesn't work at all.
The concept/idea is not what is patented. The patent is (or should be) for the specific execution of the idea. Competitors are free to implement their feature using methods other that what is covered by the patent, even if the end result gives the exact same functionality.