this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Well if it was their IP, and they had it in a product, it's theirs. They registered it over 10 years ago. Did Apple just magically come up with the same idea, or did they see and copy it?
A patent troll usually sits on patents they don't use. This is a legitimate company with products. A small guy that cannot afford to file paperwork for all their stuff immediately shouldn't be penalised.
One thing that is weird is that apple always has a lot of people ready to defend the big multi-billion dollar corp.
You can see patents once they get published, not when the provisional claim gets filed... so no, Apple could not see and copy it.
According to Masimo, Apple lured some engineers from Masimo to develop a solution... that happened to be similar enough that Masimo could file, and this time publish a patent after the fact that made Apple infringe it.
Even more people look at the finger and miss the Moon of a broken patent aystem.
There are generally 2 ways patents get infringed.
The first is some little guy comes to market, a competitor sees their product, and figures they can out-lawyer them in court. A great example is Fox pealess whistles. A variant of this is hiring experts who previously worked on patented or patentable material and having them copy the work without following reverse engineering practices in order to make sure you don't violate your previous employer's patents.
The second one is a patent troll gets an overly broad patent where anyone else doing work in the industry is going to infringe, mostly because the patent fails the obviousness test or there is prior art that the patent examiner isn't aware of. The SCO patents generally fall under this (as well as MS patenting Windows in the context of computers, Apple with their rounded rectangles, and others I can't bother to remember.
There are relatively rare cases where two inventors come up with the same idea to solve a problem (the flushing toilet is one) or someone reads filed patents and decides to copy the method directly, rather than obtaining the results using a different process.
That's even worse. When they're hiring multiple devs from there, they cannot claim they didn't know it existed. Also, if the product actually exists, they don't need to see a patent filing to copy it...