What part of that don’t you understand????

“The suit was filed…in the Eastern District of Texas, known as troll country….”

It’s called Tyler, Texas. Troll Country.

Secondly the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas is not a “county.” Dah……….

So, though I enjoyed reading your article, I agree with one of the above posts suggesting that you leave the legal stuff to the experts.

Furthermore, he should also be arguing that the smaller screen is merely one possible implementation of the prior (IBM) patent, and thus the new patent is invalidated on the grounds that it is already covered by the IBM patented.

You do also realize that parts of the NTP patent were not upheld because they invalidated by prior art, and that RIM was found not liable of infringing the patent as to those claims?

1. EMG presented the technology to Apple prior to apple having started down the iPhone path, and Apple said GTH.

2. Some evidence showing Apple stole the technology from them (like the took the LISA from Xerox).

The fact that two companies came up with two similar methods of doing something digitally leaves me cold. The implementation is what matters in the end. Does EMG have a product that does this or just ideas jotted down on paper. This is similar to the guy who patented the iPod navigation system. What? I am sorry, but I was using the iPod navigation system back in 1981. A menu of items you pick from taking you to a sub menu.

On topic:
The fact of the matter is that this guy who is suing Apple isn’t in the phone business, not even in tech, nor was he just about to launch his own similar product. He just wants money, without offering any independent utility. And this is where I’m going to agree with Erik that he is a troll, regardless of the legality.

Just to add a few extra haystacks – remember prior art need not be other patents. An academic publication, and existing product and many other things are prior art, patented or not.

My father in law successfully defended a patent lawsuit against an Italian company (at least till later appeals). The prior art he found (his client was being sued for patent infringement) was a 100+ year old mechanical device made by a Swiss company. It hadn’t been patented, but was physically, and funiitonally similar enough to the patent;s claims.

In the end the higher courts let the patent stand, but it gave the company several extra months of business

I am afraid that you still have not understood “Former PTO worker’s” point entirely. You can not simply abbreviate:

“the simplified navigation interface displayed in a form of a two-dimensional layer of cells from a plurality of layers and a plurality of cells, the two-dimensional layer in a form of a navigation matrix, each cell is a division of a screen and exclusive to a separate single navigation option associated with a specific unique input, the on-line content formatted to be displayed in one or more of the plurality of cells and formatted to be selected for navigation by one or more of the unique inputs, navigation options to change between layers of the simplified navigation interface from general to more specific in each deeper layer; receiving a user selection of one of the navigation options;”

to:

“Webpage being broken up and the parts being displayed in layers or portions via XML on a smaller screen”

and then just say you found it in the prior art. You have to match each and every feature in EMG’s claim to the prior art. And if you cannot find all the features in the claim in a single reference (whether in patent claims, a specification, or anywhere else doesn’t make much difference), then you have to prove why it would have been obvious to the skilled person to combine the knowledge from several different references.

Of course, this works both ways: the patentee also has to show that the presumed infringer’s product or method replicates each and every feature of at least one of their patent claims. “Close enough” just doesn’t cut it.

Sidenote: “Gottfurcht” translates from German into English as “Fear of God” – god had some trouble with an apple as far as I remember

Below are the first two claims from the IBM patent. They describe the same thing as the EMG claim you quote, a Webpage being broken up and the parts being displayed in layers or portions via XML on a smaller screen:

“1. A method of tailoring Web page content for display via a client device, wherein the Web page contains first and second content portions in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) format, the method comprising the following steps:

receiving a request from the client device for the Web page;
converting the first content portion from HTML format to XML format;
masking the second content portion from view of the content tailoring tool;
modifying the converted first content portion for display within the client device using a content tailoring tool in XML format; and
converting the modified first content portion from XML format to HTML format.

2. A method according to claim 1 further comprising the step of transmitting the Web page containing the modified first content portion to the client device for display therewithin.”

That’s an embodiment of the utility.

Dude, approve my patents. They’re up for opposition. I E-Filed them for $425 each.

I actually moved while my patents made it through the publication process. How do I change my address with E-File?

Link please Mr. PTO man?

Do I absolutely have to get an agent to do this for me or no?

-Incentive to approve-

This is totally incorrect, although I do understand why anyone would think this. PTO, budget wise is doing excellent. The PTO, actually used to GIVE 10% of its money to fund the federal gov’t. They stopped doing this in 2004.

As an examiner, I get the same credit for allowing a case, as a I do rejecting a case. In fact, I have to do 20X more work if I have to allow a case. Why? Because I don’t want my patent with my name on it showing up on TECHCRUNCH or NYTIMES or WSJ. If i reject an allowable patent…I make one guy mad. If i a allow a rejectable patent…I make the whole world mad. So, you can clearly see there is little incentives for me to allow a case.

But we do make most of our money from allowance fee and maintenance fee. Since an applicant pays more if the application gets allowed, that means each patent application that is reject is subsidized. Applications should NOT be subsidized!!! In fact, the PTO should raise the fee for applications so that big companies file some what important cases and so we can catch up on the 700k cases we are behind.

-Patent Trolls-

I think Erick wrote a great article about Nathan Myravold. This needs to be stopped. Unfortunely, this can only be done thru congress(so don’t count on it). One of the problems in the PTO, there is unifed rules for all patents (tech, bio, and etc). So when you have comprehensive laws that cover everything under the sun, your bound to have problems. There was legislations in 2007 to cap patent awards. But since drug companies usually spend millions to innovate, they lobbied against such legislation (and won). Unlike tech, which anyone can just file an idea and get a patent (real estate developer in this case).

-Required to list all other patents-

This is also incorrect. The law does require you to file all prior art but think about this for a second. If you are spending tons of money to file a patent, your not going to give me the prior art that I can use against you. Plus there are thousands of patents on each topic…are you going to let your lawyer take the time to file each of those patents? What most applicants do is file no prior art and act like the applicantion is new. This actually works out great for both parties!

I looked thru this case, the lawyer filed 283 patents as prior art. I can almost gurantee you the pto examiner didn’t spend more than 5 second per patent. We have pretty good database that is faster to search through then look at 283 patents that a lawyer filed….just to waste my time (if it was any good, he woudn’t file it).

So are they lying? Nope, they are protecting their client interest. The ONLY time they file relevant prior art, which I can use against them… is that if they filed a patent in UK and UK Patent office cites a prior art, they have to let us know in the pending US application. If they dont’t…then they can get in trouble because only then we can PROVE they are hiding information. But at that point, they all follow the rules. So to sum up, 99% of applicant prior art are completely useless and we mostly pay attention to prior art that an actual employees of patent office around the world files for that app.

There was rules setup that for every prior art applicant files…they have to provide a summary. That way they won’t file BS 283 patents (which no one reads)…insead file maybe 10 best current related art and EXPLAIN why they are relevant.

-Is it a valid patent-

I do not know…I have to do research on it. But you are wrong in understanding the patent (not your fault, blame the lawyer for writing it like this). A regular person, would look at the pictures and read the abstract and think that is the patent that they are filing. This is correct in theory but not in reality. Since the lawyer makes many amendments to the claims, the final product is totally different thent the actual original claims and abstract (this is intentional). Also, they “recycle” the abstract, pictures, spec all the time.

So for this case, the genearly idea maybe “content reformatted from HTML to XML” but that is not the actual invention. So alot of people will get mad (only reading the abstract), that someone got a patent for this case but this is NOT the invention.

To understand what the invention is you have to read the CLAIMS. But most people will read claim 1 and get lost and go back to the abstract and think that is the invention. Most importantly, EVERY single limitations in the claims must be met thru prior art or be allowed. Same is true with the lawsuit…apple MUST infringe on all limitations of claim 1 or else they are not liable.

I quoated the part I think might have patentable weight and why EMG got the patent. You found art on the basics but not the actual stuff they are going after. If you can find the stuff below, send that to apple but I don’t think you will (at least not on one patent, might need to combine several patents). This will take some core researching…and not as simple as running it thru M-CAM…I’m not sure what M-CAM is…but it sounds like it matches keywords to find similar patents. You found the haystack (”content reformatted from HTML to XML”), now you need to find the needle (which is the quoted part below from claim 1)

Hope this helps!!

“the simplified navigation interface displayed in a form of a two-dimensional layer of cells from a plurality of layers and a plurality of cells, the two-dimensional layer in a form of a navigation matrix, each cell is a division of a screen and exclusive to a separate single navigation option associated with a specific unique input, the on-line content formatted to be displayed in one or more of the plurality of cells and formatted to be selected for navigation by one or more of the unique inputs, navigation options to change between layers of the simplified navigation interface from general to more specific in each deeper layer; receiving a user selection of one of the navigation options;”

Mike didn’t co-author any of the AChex patents including the one that was co-assigned to Western Union.