Post #21: Slide-to-Infringe

Apple just has been on the losing end of things lately.  It was recently handed a ruling in Germany that said its slide-to-unlock patent is invalidated.  Now if I'm not mistaken, this is what originally caused problems with Samsung and forced them to figure out another system to unlock the their devices.  My Android right now offers a variety of options to unlock, some of which are pretty neat such as face recognition, movement or sliding a code onto the screen.  Not just slide to unlock or putting in a few numbers.  The fact that Samsung didn't have the patent to do this kind of patent forced it to innovate, which is an interesting idea because patents are normally the source of the innovation.

The patent in question was EP1964022, which says "unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image."  Even though Apple had come up with fourteen different arguments as to why it shouldn't be invalidated, the Bundespatentgericht, Germany's Federal Patent Court still said it was.  The judges said that it failed to meet the technicity requirements under European Patent Law because it doesn't solve a technical problem through a technical solution and the slide is not a technical innovation.  Clearly the slide isn't a technological innovation, but it was able to get patented in here in the United States because we can patent "everything under the sun made by man," as we learned in the beginning of class.  The question I have is whether it is advantageous or not to have such technical requirements to get patents? I can't quite think of an example right now... but I can see how this could be a problem.  As stated before, the patent in the US forced Apple's competitors to figure out other slide to unlock features and it wouldn't have if there was no patent.  Are these strict patent laws in Europe good or bad?

Post #20: You Wish You Could Collaborate With Me

We haven't really talked on this topic much, but Joint Inventorship is an interesting topic to explore.  What does it mean when you're racing to invent something against someone else and you both patent your invention at the same time? When you're both working on the same thing and your competition patents it before you?  These are the questions many inventors face everyday when they know they are working on something that is also getting worked on by many other inventors across the world.  Joint Inventorship let's you patent something that multiple people worked on so you can all take credit for it.  However, back in 2000, this didn't quite happen for Dr. Rubin and Dr. Gusella.

In a classic race to discover something new and get patented/published, although Dr. Rubin won the race, he didn't turn out to be so lucky.  When he identified the IKAP Gene mutation as something that caused Familial Dysautonomia, he sent his article to the American Journal of Human Genetics to get it peer reviewed.  However, they sent it to Dr. Gusella, Rubin's known competitor.  When that happened, Gusella realized the position he was in with his competitors information and filed a provisional patent in early 2001.  When Gusella was approved for his patent, Dr. Rubin sued under 35 U.S.C. §256, saying that he should be a "join-inventor."  As it turns out, since they never directly worked together, there wasn't much leeway for Rubin to explain himself as a "joint-inventor."  And that is exactly what happened -- the court dismissed the case since there was no evidence of collaboration.  


I think it is unfair to Rubin who spent just as much time as Gusella on working to identify this gene and then when he did, he got it swept it away by shady antics.  I am just curious as to why Rubin doesn't get any credit for it since he was getting it published and I assume eventually patented, but didn't because of a mistake by the AJHG.  It is also quite disheartening to see how intense competition is to the point where someone will do something like Dr. Gusella, even though Rubin had discovered the IKAP Gene mutation first.  Hopefully this doesn't happen to me or anyone I know in the future.