Even An East Texas Court Has Told Uniloc That It Can't Patent Math
from the there-are-limits,-people dept
Even a notoriously patent-friendly court like the district court in East Texas has admitted that there are limits to what's patentable. Notorious patent troll Uniloc, whose name has been appearing quite frequently lately, has lost one part of its big cases, against Rackspace, after the district court in Tyler, Texas has said one of the patents in question in this lawsuit, US Patent 5,892,697 on a "Method and apparatus for handling overflow and underflow in processing floating-point numbers," is really patenting basic mathematical functions, and you can't do that.Claim 1, then, is merely an improvement on a mathematical formula. Even when tied to computing, since floating-point numbers are a computerized numeric format, the conversion of floating-point numbers has applications across fields as diverse as science, math, communications, security, graphics, and games. Thus, a patent on Claim 1 would cover vast end uses, impeding the onward march of science.While this is nice, this is just one patent in that particular lawsuit, and Uniloc has dozens of other patents that it's using in other lawsuits. And Uniloc shows no signs of slowing down. Just the other day it filed 12 new lawsuits.
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Filed Under: east texas, math, patent trolling, patents
Companies: rackspace, uniloc
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Re: Re: Benchslap
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If anything i see them coming under a very bright spotlight , with very powerful people looking for anything to attack them, be it something from the distant past to something created on the spur of the moment, As always with these types their greed will be their downfall.
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Letters�!
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eg. 2+2=Fish
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FAIRY GODPATENTS!!!
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...don't they actually have to have a working "apparatus"?
And if they have a working "apparatus", if somone has a different "apparatus" which achieves the same end result, it wouldn't violate their patent!
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...don't they actually have to have a working "apparatus"?
And if they have a working "apparatus", if somone has a different "apparatus" which achieves the same end result, it wouldn't violate their patent!"
Buffering...they drew up a patent for buffering data...by the looks of it graphics data...specifically 3D rendering and animation...and yes they are not patentable which is why most companies like nVidia and AMD keep those formulas a secret.
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who's the patent officer who approved it
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This is amazing.
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Don't want to be cynical but are they under some federal review or something as this seems very not like them. Don't get me wrong am proud of them for any reason a decent court opinion (IMHO) appears.
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Copyright law says that if I independently come up with a similar or even identical piece of code/music/writing as someone else, I still get to own and use my creation.
Patent law says that if I invent something that someone else also invented, the first person to invent it "wins," and the other person loses out on his invention.
This is wrong, and changing this one thing would be enough to completely fix the patent system.
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Grrr... Uniloc chaps my hide, but Google seems to be apathetic.
What bothers me about this is that when you go to Google to ask about this, they're all "Sorry. We can't help. You need to deal with them yourself."
And you're all, "But you wrote and distributed teh Android. How can can this be patented?"
And Google's all "Sorry."
And Uniloc rakes in the millions that it has extorted from people.
http://www.x-plane.com/x-world/lawsuit/
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