If it were patented in the US, they can just add “on a computer” or “on a mobile device” to something obvious and trivial and get a patent.
Indeed. And what the impact is on Garmin and their solution.
I don’t think patents are that easy IF there are competitors who are well resourced and who object to the application.
And this one would have been very visible so e.g. Garmin would have been right in there objecting like hell, on blindlingly obvious prior-art grounds. It would be interesting to see the patent; I bet it is much more restricted than the original application.
Back at Oshkosh, I met with the Aspen CEO at the press breakfast. He indicated that Aspen and Garmin were cooperating with each other to a greater degree than normal. Garmin then issued an announcement that the GDL88 ADS-B receiver was adding support for weather and traffic on the MX20, GMX200 and that it would also work with Aspen. Even if the patent affects Garmin, Garmin has patents of its own that would be of benefit to Aspen. Aspen has more to lose than Garmin and at most I see this as a bargaining chip.
Peter wrote:
And this one would have been very visible so e.g. Garmin would have been right in there objecting like hell, on blindlingly obvious prior-art grounds.
Unfortunately, no – the way the US patent office appears to deal with things is rubber stamp them, then let the courts figure it out later on when someone sues for patent infringement. Companies usually just end up cross-licensing each other’s patents especially if one threatens to sue (it becomes a form of ‘mutually assured destruction’ – even open source software has a patent defence battlechest in the US to ward off predatory patent suits against open source authors with few resources to defend themselves – so a company threatens to sue some OSS author, and the patent defence organization says, well, you infringe these patents of ours so back off or we’ll countersue) so the patents never get actually challenged.
The trouble starts when “non practising entities” (aka patent trolls) buy the rights to the patent then sue everyone in sight, because the worst that can happen is the patent gets invalidated. They usually go after targets that can’t defend themselves easily (in other words, unlikely to happen with these patents).
It’s a big controversy in the US due to the dubious quality of so many software/computing patents in the US.
Peter wrote:
I don’t think patents are that easy IF there are competitors who are well resourced and who object to the application.
Patents in the US are trivial to get — at least in IT — and have nothing to do with the quality of the invention. Companies collect them and use them mostly as a defence. Google violate 10,000 Apple patents and Apple violate 10,000 Google patents so there is a guaranteed truce.
The effect of the mechanism is that it creates and secures oligopolies because small companies and newcomers can be crushed at any time over (ridiculous) patent allegations. One of the IT companies I co-founded lost millions of dollars over a nonsensical patent lawsuit with everything including jury trial (read: 12 incompetent people deciding on a highly technical matter). We won the whole thing and had a fantastic outcome at the end of all of it but during the process we literally spent millions on it. The not so great aspects of the US legal system…
So the goal is clear: get as many patents as you can, file every tiny shred of “innovation”.
I’ve just had a read of the patent.
My brain is not up to spending hours unravelling how the 12 (12!) claims relate but anybody infringing this would need to infringe all 12, so this patent is probably worthless. Like so many in technology or IT, it describes a very specialised way of achieving something. It also talks about some sort of license server…
There is also prior art on the general idea of
e.g. Meggitt had a means of loading their certified glass cockpit products from a laptop (though via an SD card) way before 2011.
Peter wrote:
this patent is probably worthless.
Like most IT patents, it is worthless only in the sense that it would not hold up in court. Either because of prior art or that it is obvious to a practitioner. OTOH taking it to court is so expensive that it will have enormous FUD value.
(About two decades back, a company I worked in had a potential patent dispute. Our legal counsel told us that as many as half of the patents that were challenged were eventually thrown out by the courts. That was in Sweden, but situation is bound to be even worse in the US considering the very lax checking by their patent office.)
