04.07.16
Gemini version available ♊︎Samsung to Potentially Challenge Design Patents in the US Supreme Court While Filing Patent Applications for Designs
Defensive, offensive, or just outright dumb and unnecessary? Hypocritical for sure.
Summary: Dumb patents on very dumb/trivial ideas (like gate-locking, or slide to unlock) still a subject which the higher US courts deem worthy of Supreme intervention (while Samsung itself joins the problem with new patent filings)
KOREAN giant Samsung, the market leader in the Android space, is an attractive target for patent lawsuits, even though conventionally Korean companies aren’t combative patent aggressors themselves (they don’t deserve the pricey defendant’s treatment). There’s no escaping the aggressors for Samsung, which even got attacked using EPO patents on software and designs (Samsung won as the EPO patents turned out to be bogus, i.e. erroneously granted).
“There’s no escaping the aggressors for Samsung, which even got attacked using EPO patents on software and designs (Samsung won as the EPO patents turned out to be bogus, i.e. erroneously granted).”Samsung is pursuing design patents of its own now, based on the latest news, e.g. [1, 2, 3] (we found more than a dozen articles about this one) and Apple’s attack on Samsung using design patents is still a subject of discussion, even 2.5 weeks after it was news. This one new blog post says: “Oral argument has not yet been scheduled, but I imagine it will be held sometime in October or November after the Court returns from its summer recess. For now, at least, it seems likely that the Court will still consist of only eight, not the full complement of nine, justices.”
By extension, a lot of design patents will be considered/assessed by SCOTUS, but why were they being granted in the first place? Designs are often covered by laws other than patent law. In the context of patents it’s common for callback functions, i.e. software (behaviour), to be incorporated into the static (visual i.e. plottable) design.
“In the context of patents it’s common for callback functions, i.e. software (behaviour), to be incorporated into the static (visual i.e. plottable) design.”As we pointed out here a long time ago, design patents are in many cases just a subclass of software patents, hence they both need to go away. MIP does not quite agree and in a very recent post about “design rights” (not quite the same as design patents) it said: “After attending the recent INTA/AIPPI conference on “Designs: Into the Future”, James Nurton summarises what there is to love about designs – and also a few reasons not to love them. On the following pages, we also look in depth at the recent Trunki decision in the UK and the pending Apple v Samsung case in the United States”
The Trunki case has been mentioned many times in our daily links. It’s truly dumb and some might call it outrageous. But it’s not about patents. There is hardly a connection/parable here. Either way, to conflate or interject it into the Apple v Samsung would only mislead. █
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Anton_P said,
April 8, 2016 at 2:31 am
Do you have a link to your earlier piece about design patents/design rights being a sub-set of software patents? The concept seems a bit weird to me. Thanks, A.