I'm no lawyer, nor do I have a dog in this fight at the moment. So I may be overstating my point a bit for theatrical effect. But I'm still not convinced that tinkering with the definition of obvious is going to solve our patent troll problem. So long as it still needs to be litigated, it doesn't matter how obvious a troll's patent is, just as it doesn't matter whether the gun you're being mugged with is loaded or not.
Do you think that I, or anyone else, would have put up with all the pain and the long hours in the lab if we new that Agilent or Biorad could swoop in at any moment and take our markets away from us using their marketing clout?
I'm sure that folks reading this site -- the ones whose products could be cloned by Google or Yahoo at any moment; the ones whose earlier companies were crushed by Microsoft -- have an entire orchestra of tiny violins to play for you.
I used to build multiphoton microscopes for a living. The story of the multiphoton microscope is amusing. Once upon a time, Bio-Rad held the exclusive rights to the original Cornell patent. Their competitor, Zeiss, read the patent and decided to argue that it covered only the use of sub-picosecond laser pulses for microscopy. So Zeiss came out with a competing system intended for use with 1 picosecond pulses. Of course, if you found yourself in the lab late at night and you happened to turn the knob on your laser that shortened the pulses to 80 femtoseconds, your Zeiss microscope presumably continued to work pretty well, but with a big improvement in image brightness and depth. I assume that Zeiss refused to be held responsible for that improvement -- after all, the scope wasn't intentionally designed for short pulses, because that would be Legally Dubious.
Naturally, the whole thing went to court for years. The issue was settled when Zeiss bought out Bio-Rad. See here:
I can't tell you who won or who lost, there, but here's my conclusion: If a company the size of Agilent or Zeiss or Biorad wants to violate your patent, they'll just do it. All you were doing, in those nights in the lab, was trying to improve your negotiating position in the resulting court case.
(That, BTW, was a traditional hardware patent, not the software kind. If yours is a software-only patent... good luck with that.)
Do you think that I, or anyone else, would have put up with all the pain and the long hours in the lab if we new that Agilent or Biorad could swoop in at any moment and take our markets away from us using their marketing clout?
I'm sure that folks reading this site -- the ones whose products could be cloned by Google or Yahoo at any moment; the ones whose earlier companies were crushed by Microsoft -- have an entire orchestra of tiny violins to play for you.
I used to build multiphoton microscopes for a living. The story of the multiphoton microscope is amusing. Once upon a time, Bio-Rad held the exclusive rights to the original Cornell patent. Their competitor, Zeiss, read the patent and decided to argue that it covered only the use of sub-picosecond laser pulses for microscopy. So Zeiss came out with a competing system intended for use with 1 picosecond pulses. Of course, if you found yourself in the lab late at night and you happened to turn the knob on your laser that shortened the pulses to 80 femtoseconds, your Zeiss microscope presumably continued to work pretty well, but with a big improvement in image brightness and depth. I assume that Zeiss refused to be held responsible for that improvement -- after all, the scope wasn't intentionally designed for short pulses, because that would be Legally Dubious.
Naturally, the whole thing went to court for years. The issue was settled when Zeiss bought out Bio-Rad. See here:
http://listserv.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0401&L=conf...
I can't tell you who won or who lost, there, but here's my conclusion: If a company the size of Agilent or Zeiss or Biorad wants to violate your patent, they'll just do it. All you were doing, in those nights in the lab, was trying to improve your negotiating position in the resulting court case.
(That, BTW, was a traditional hardware patent, not the software kind. If yours is a software-only patent... good luck with that.)