Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Thought Breaking Wizardry of the Patent Hate Clan

YOU should've known
even before you thought
about it in the first place.
Critical thinking is so yesterday.
Running with the bulls and rolling gloriously in their tail mud is what the herds of today do to stay "with it".

Take for example (please) our friends and family at the F___ Institute. They know how to Fix what "Ails" the Patent System.

They say for example:
"Created over 200 years ago, the current system does more to inhibit innovation than promote it. And it all starts with patents – freely granted by the U.S. government – that last 20 years from the date an application is filed."

Anyone who knows anything
(and that's a small number already)
about the "current" US Patent System,
knows that it was "reformed" in a major way in 2011 by the AIA (America Invents (no-more) Act).

A bit of New Year's celebration math:
2015 - 2011 = ????
informs the few math literati of us
that it was not 200 years ago.

It's not "free".
No patent "lasts 20 years".
Every part of just that small blurb above is an untruthiness.

And of course that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Truthiness is not an option for the Patent Hate Clan.

HEY!!! It's New Years !!! Let's just celebrate ...

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Going Deeper Down the Abstraction Death Spiral

CONTENT EXTRACTION v. WELLS FARGO BANK [OPINION]:

"Applying Mayo/Alice step one, we agree with the district court that the claims of the asserted patents are drawn to the abstract idea of 1) collecting data, 2) recognizing certain data within the collected data set, and 3) storing that recognized data in a memory. The concept of data collection, recognition, and storage is undisputedly well-known. Indeed, humans have always performed these functions." --Chen J on behalf of the panel.

To "abstract" means, in one sense, to remove details and draw out a more generalized idea, for example from a first set of words (i.e. words of a claim).

Words, however, are abstractions themselves.
So when one abstracts from a set of words, one is abstracting an abstraction.

How deep down can one abstract from an abstraction of an abstraction of a ...?

The end of the downward spiral is the idea of "idea" itself.

When we get to that level, most of us have no idea what idea means to begin with, let alone what "abstract" idea means.

The CONTENT EXTRACTION court goes on to explain:

"Applying Mayo/Alice step two, we agree with the district court that the asserted patents contain no limitations— either individually or as an ordered combination— that transform the claims into a patent-eligible application. ... CET’s claims merely recite the use of this existing scanning and processing technology to recognize and store data from specific data fields such as amounts, addresses, and dates. ... There is no “inventive concept” in CET’s use of a generic scanner and computer to perform well-understood, routine, and conventional activities commonly used in industry. ... At most, CET’s claims attempt to limit the abstract idea of recognizing and storing information from hard copy documents using a scanner and a computer to a particular technological environment. Such a limitation has been held insufficient to save [an inherently doomed] claim in this context."

So there you have it.
Claim words which are merely abstraction to begin with, need to be alchemically "transformed" into patent-eligible stuff by not attempting to limit ... otherwise they are inherently doomed.

From the '855 patent:

The location of data to be extracted can be defined in a number of ways other than by use of a template. For example, the user can designate the absolute location of information on the document with respect to a grid overlaid on the document, e.g., always on line 3, starting in column i. The user can also identify information by specifying the relative location of information to be extracted, e.g., always two lines below the piece of data named "salutation", starting in column 3. The user can also specify the location of information to be extracted by variable location specification. For example, if the hard copy document is a letter, the module would conduct a key word search for the term "Dear Sir:". Wherever this term "Dear Sir:" is located, this piece of data would be associated with the variable specified by the user, for example, the variable "salutation." In addition, a defined set of conventional symbols can be used to signify certain recurring data items for the convenience of users of the instant invention. For example, a "@" symbol can be used to delineate the vendor name as follows: "@XYZ Corporation@". Other examples of the use of symbols to delineate information will be described with reference to FIG. 14.

The maintains definition module 2.2 is also used to maintain data relationships in accordance with content instructions and to maintain input file formats in accordance with transmission format instructions. Relationships are defined and maintained between pieces of data, specified by, for example, the names of variables, through the define relationships module 2.2.2. The names of pieces of data on the document are retrieved by, for example, the define template module 2.2.1, and are passed to the define relationships module 2.2.2. The user may then provide any additional pieces of data needed to generate an input file for a particular application program or unit, such as an input file line number. The user, the applications software, and/or instructions previously stored in memory then establishes the contents of the input file by defining relationships between pieces of data using content instructions. Specific examples of content instructions will be discussed below in conjunction with FIGS. 11, 12A, 12B, 12C, 13A, 13B, and 13C.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Discovery Death Squads

IN RE BRCA1- AND BRCA2-BASED HEREDITARY CANCER TEST PATENT LITIGATION

"We do not read the Supreme Court’s opinion in Myriad as conferring patent eligibility on composition of matter claims directed to naturally occurring DNA strands under such circumstances. A DNA structure with a function similar to that found in nature can only be patent eligible as a composition of matter if it has a unique structure, different from anything found in nature. Myriad, 133 S. Ct. at 2116–17 (citing Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. at 309–10). Primers do not have such a different structure and are patent ineligible."

Ah yes.
The judicial ego.
Know it alls spawned from their own mental test tubes.

Electrons are real.
Molecules have wavefunctions as part of their "structural" makeup.
An in-DNA strand is not "structurally" the same as an isolated snippet.
But then again, what do so-called "scientists" know when in the presence of Mount Olympus giants?

Saturday, December 6, 2014

This is not a kiosk?

From Judge Mayer's dissent in DDR Holdings:
This is incorrect. DDR’s claims do, in fact, simply take a well-known and widely-applied business practice and apply it using a generic computer and the Internet. The idea of having a “store within a store” was in widespread use well before the dawn of e-commerce. For example, National Leisure Group, Inc. (“NLG”), one of the defendants here, previously “sold vacations at . . . BJ’s Wholesale Clubs through point of purchase displays in the 45 BJ’s Clubs along the Eastern Seaboard.” Br. of Defendants- Appellants National Leisure Group, Inc. and World Travel Holdings, Inc. at 4. DDR’s patents are directed to the same concept. Just as visitors to BJ’s Wholesale Clubs could purchase travel products from NLG without leaving the BJ’s warehouse, the claimed system permits a person to purchase goods from a third-party vendor, but still have the visual “impression that she is viewing pages served by the [original host merchant].” ’399 patent col.3 ll.23–24; see ante at 3 (explaining that DDR’s claimed system “permits a website visitor, in a sense, to be in two places at the same time”). Indeed, any doubt as to whether the claimed system is merely an Internet iteration of an established business practice is laid to rest by the fact that one of the named inventors acknowledged that the innovative aspect of his claimed invention was “[t]aking something that worked in the real world and doing it on the Internet.” J.A. 03208.

Representative claim 19 of the ’399 patent recites:

19. A system useful in an outsource provider serving web pages offering commercial opportunities, the system comprising:
(a) a computer store containing data, for each of a plurality of first web pages, defining a plurality of visually perceptible elements, which visually perceptible elements correspond to the plurality of first web pages;
(i) wherein each of the first web pages belongs to one of a plurality of web page owners; (ii) wherein each of the first web pages displays at least one active link associated with a commerce object associated with a buying opportunity of a selected one of a plurality of merchants; and
(iii) wherein the selected merchant, the outsource provider, and the owner of the first web page displaying the associated link are each third parties with respect to one other;
(b) a computer server at the outsource provider, which computer server is coupled to the computer store and programmed to:
(i) receive from the web browser of a computer user a signal indicating activation of one of the links displayed by one of the first web pages;
(ii) automatically identify as the source page the one of the first web pages on which the link has been activated; (iii) in response to identification of the source page, automatically retrieve the stored data corresponding to the source page; and
(iv) using the data retrieved, automatically generate and transmit to the web browser a second web page that displays: (A) information associated with the commerce object associated with the link that has been activated, and (B) the plurality of visually perceptible elements visually corresponding to the source page.

In other words, according to Mayer J.,
Every night,
When the little boys and little
other surfers of the Internets things
go to sleep ...

Little elves appear in a big ole' warehouse and build a whole new BJ "store", and a kiosk in the store and ship the whole mere little ole' "store" things to wherever next our little boys and little other surfers of the Internets things will be the next day.

Joy to the world.
All the boys and girls.
Jeremiah really was a bullfrog
and a good friend