Bonum Certa Men Certa

Design/Software Patents Next on the Supreme Court's Agenda as Android/Linux Case Escalated to Highest Possible Level

Wasting valuable courts' time on some silly patents that are neither novel nor nontrivial (prior art below)

Gates



Summary: The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is going to deal with inane Apple patents that are being used in an effort to make billions of dollars ('Apple tax') out of a Linux-based operating system (Android) which competes against Apple's

TECHRIGHTS has among its primary goals the abolition of software patents and the success of FOSS, which is ascending in Europe these days. This would be beneficial to software developers and probably for the public as a whole. The losers? Probably patent lawyers and their biggest clients, who refer to their patent portfolio as a "war chest".



"We believe that real change can come from the courts, especially the high ones, which everyone must follow."We recognise that significant change hardly comes from politicians anymore, as they are nowadays funded (especially in the United States) by the aforementioned "biggest clients". We believe that real change can come from the courts, especially the high ones, which everyone must follow. Consider the long-awaited SCOTUS appeal regarding an Android case. Can SCOTUS bury so-called ‘design’ patents, which are essentially akin to software patents (usually a GUI with some buttons and unspecified callback functions for behaviour)? After Alice, which changed a lot, we sure hope so.

We have been covering Apple's attacks on Android/Linux since the very beginning (the Apple vs HTC case). It's still being dragged on, even several years after the death of Steve Jobs, which says a lot about Apple (they are still an aggressive patenting company). The expected decision on whether it shall be dealt with by SCOTUS was scheduled for Monday, after some people waited in vain on Friday. This has been covered to death in the media by now, so we won't bore our readers with yet more of the mundane pertinent details (we covered these before anyway, including the laughable patents at hand [1, 2]).

"It's still being dragged on, even several years after the death of Steve Jobs, which says a lot about Apple (they are still an aggressive patenting company)."To give just a short media survey/roundup, Spicy IP oddly enough chose to focus on another case. It said: "We’ve been given to believe that the Roche vs Cipla appeal came up at the Supreme Court today."

An article by Joe Mullin, on the other hand, noted: "Are design patents for "carpets and wall-papers and oil-cloths" or smartphones?"

Korean English-speaking media said the obvious, FOSS proponents like SJVN spread the news early on, and maybe hundreds if not thousands of media outlets wrote about this as well. To quote SJVN: "Years in the making, the Supreme Court has agreed to listen to Samsung's appeal of Apple's design patent awards. [...] At first it looked like Apple won its design patent wars over Samsung. As time went on, that "victory" started looking more like a defeat as Samsung won its appeals. Now, Apple is in even more trouble. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has elected to hear Samsung's appeal of the $548-million award lower courts gave Apple."

"The expected decision on whether it shall be dealt with by SCOTUS was scheduled for Monday, after some people waited in vain on Friday."To quote Florian Müller, who used to be a FOSS opponent (Microsoft/Horacio Gutierrez paid him for this) but later seemed to have flipped back to pro-FOSS, he wrote: "The Supreme Court of the United States has just published a decision it had already made on Friday (March 18): Samsung's December 2015 petition for writ of certiorari (request for Supreme Court review) in Apple's design patents case has been GRANTED with respect to question 2 (damages). As a result, the Apple v. Samsung damages re-retrial scheduled to begin later this month in the Northern District of California is almost certainly going to be postponed indefinitely, as Apple is seeking unapportioned infringer's profits on all five products still at issue and won't be entitled to that if Samsung prevails in the top U.S. court."

"For my take on why design patents were neglected for such a long (and crucial) time," wrote this person to Müller (whose expertise is this one particular case), linking to the paper about design patents. To quote part of the abstract: "This project, initially published as a two-part series of articles entitled 'Design and Deviance: Patent as Symbol, Rhetoric as Metric,' reveals the unrecognized power of gender and sexuality norms in the deep discourse of pivotal American case law on design patents."

"A re-retrial was scheduled to take place in California in a week," Müller wrote. "In light of the Supreme Court decision I'm sure Judge Koh will cancel it."

The reason we quote Müller so extensively about this particular case is that, with respect, he did follow this case for many years. He later added:



"Watch how some patent lawyers view things. It’s all about money to them (even a crude picture of dollars)."Here is an analysis by a Professor of Law (journalists tend to be clueless about these matters) and Patently-O's take from Jason Rantanen and Professor Crouch, who looks for some input through a survey.

Levy from CCIA (lobbying) wrote: "CCIA argued to the Court that this interpretation overreached in an unconstitutional way, and that the correct interpretation could be found by looking at a related statute, the Vessel Hull Design Protection Act." Rob Lever, a journalist, said that: "The US Supreme Court on Monday opened the door to reducing the hundreds of millions of dollars in damages owed by Samsung to Apple in the blockbuster patent case between the world's biggest smartphone makers."

"We look forward to following the case and hopefully we shall see Apple walking away with nothing."Watch how some patent lawyers view things. It's all about money to them (even a crude picture of dollars). To quote a part of it: "It is penny-wise and pound-foolish to scrimp on “preparation and prosecution” of patents—which if the invention is any good, will be infringed and attacked—and then to spend hundreds of millions on patent infringement and validity and damages litigation and appeals."

We look forward to following the case and hopefully we shall see Apple walking away with nothing. As usual, only the lawyers are guaranteed to win.

Recent Techrights' Posts

The LLM Bubble is About to Implode, Gimmicks and Financial Shell Games Cannot Prevent That, Only Delay It
To inflate the bubble MElon is now doing the classic trick of buying from oneself for a fictional value
 
Links 30/03/2025: Security Breaches, Crackdowns on Dissent/Rival Politicians
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/03/2025: London Soundtrack Festival, Superbloom, gmiCAPTCHA
Links for the day
Phasing Out Vista 10 in Nations Where ~90% of Windows Users Still Rely on It
Recipe for another Microsoft disaster
The Cost of Pursuing the Much-Needed Reform/Shield Against Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs)
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”
Links 30/03/2025: Contagious Ideas, Signal Leak, and Squashing Lousy Patents
Links for the day
Links 30/03/2025: "Quantum Randomness" and "F-1 Visa Revoked" in US
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/03/2025: US as a Threat, Returning to the WWW
Links for the day
Links 30/03/2025: Judge Blocks Dismantling Of VOA, Turkey Arrested Many Journalists
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 29, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, March 29, 2025
Judges Would Never Rule for Men Who Strangle Women or Against Women Who Merely Wrote Articles About Abuse They Had Received From Men
We don't intend to do "trial by media", so we won't be disclosing claims and defences until it's over
Windows is an Unnatural Disaster, It is Also Avoidable
there's a wide window of opportunity opening
Gemini Links 29/03/2025: Less YouTube and More Station
Links for the day
In Some Countries, Such as Thailand, Firefox is Already Measured at Less Than 2% (One Day Firefox Will Get Blocked, Not Only Lack Support)
Web consolidation around Chrom-isms will doom the Web as we know it
Killing the News With Spam and Slop Benefits Those Whose Desire is an Uninformed Population
adoption of Free software depends indirectly on political activities/activism
Links 29/03/2025: Trademarks Battles, Fires Destroy More Than 3,000 South Korean Homes
Links for the day
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Privacy Fiasco in Detail: An Introduction
Perhaps tomorrow or perhaps next week we'll share more information about what happened and what was reported to the California Privacy Protection Agency
Links 29/03/2025: More Crackdowns on Science, "Hey Hi" Slopping is Flopping
Links for the day
IBM's BS (Bait, Switch) Regarding Ways to Stay Onboard
PIPs, RTOs, and forced relocations are just an illusion of choice (or ability to recover)
Costa Rica Almost Bankrupt Because of Microsoft
the incidents in Costa Rica are Windows incidents
Gemini Links 29/03/2025: Art of Looking, Wireguard, EMacs
Links for the day
Links 29/03/2025: Attacks on Social Security and War Updates
Links for the day
Banned evidence: Ars Technica forums censored email predicting DebConf23 death, Abraham Raji & Debian cover-up
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, March 28, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, March 28, 2025
Intimidation, Threats, and Bullying Not Tolerated by Techrights
When it comes to our reporting, safety always comes first
A World Without Rules
We're long insisted on better laws and actual enforcement of them (applicable to all, not selectively applied)
statCounter Sees Microsoft Windows Falling to New, Unprecedented Lows in Palau
Taking Android into account, Windows is now down to an all-time low of 14%
Google News Lost the Fight to LLM Slop (While Google Itself Sells Slop, Nowadays Under the Name "Gemini")
Many people say that "Google is getting worse"; that's almost an understatement
Links 28/03/2025: AirAsia Trouble Again, UMich Culls All DEI Programs
Links for the day
Gemini Links 28/03/2025: Alexa is for Gullible People, Rant About Feature Overload
Links for the day
The SLAPPs From the Microsoft Strangler (and Sidekick) No Better Than Patent Trolling
one must never settle with trolls
Something to Celebrate in Gemini Protocol
More capsules and users join in
Links 28/03/2025: Last Reminder "to Delete Your 23andMe Data", "UK's First Permanent Facial Recognition Cameras Installed"
Links for the day
Microsoft Canonical Continues Its FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) Campaign, Reveals Google Too Sponsored It
They're paid-for lies from a Chinese company that takes GAFAM money to write puff pieces about them
Android Rises Above 76% in Mozambique, Leaving Windows in the Dust
Windows may soon be measured as smaller than Apple's iOS
IBM, Red Hat and Microsoft Probably Also Manipulate Metrics (It Helps Con the Shareholders)
Wall Street's credibility will depend on enforcement of "checks and balances"
Slopwatch: trendhunter.com and Other Pure Junk From "Google News"
The need to vet sources is hardly new; anyone can spew out anything, anywhere. There's a need for vetting.
Gemini Links 28/03/2025: Rewatching The X-Files, Slop Concerns, and NOSTR Censorship
Links for the day
Links 28/03/2025: Australia at Risk, EPO Grants Illegal Patents With Illegal Effect
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, March 27, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, March 27, 2025