Yup, they hire all types of scientists. I met up with a recruiter for the USPO at the career fair last year. She went on and on about how awesome the benefits and workplace are and described the job and by the end of it i had a distinct impression that the kind of people who end up recruited by the USPO must be overwhelmingly inept at their field. I've had a different view of the US patent process ever since.

When i derailed the whole conversation with my comment about razing the USPO, i was referring to the whole patent system, not just the USPO per se. Protecting e.g. software and nuances of UIs is just ridiculous.

As expected ITC has decided to also investigate Apple's case against Nokia. Onward, Legal soldiers, marching as to War.

Apple Inc.’s patent-infringement complaint seeking to block Nokia Oyj’s phone imports into the U.S. will be investigated by a U.S. trade agency. The U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington said yesterday it will consider the complaint filed last month and decide whether to ban the imports.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=a4xrkt3A4eeI

Anyone know/remember how long it usually takes the ITC to come to a decision about these things? (and any word on Nokia's case against Apple, that the ITC is investigating?)

It's lot faster than regular courts. In Nokia's case against Apple the ITC judge has allready set tentative deadline for judgement by the end of January 2011.

Documents availeable from ITC site so far are mostly lawyers and law firms agreeing to basic rules of ITC case.

Only the tentative end date is set, and judge has also ruled that Nokia and Apple have to to try to settle case outside the court at least three times and these meetings have to be face to face instead of teleconferencing.

Couple of things happened past few days.

The Delaware case has been put on hold until ITC makes it's decision. It won't start until 2012, or actually propably never considering that (very likely) the case will be settled at lastest after ITC's decision.

The other development is that Nokia has made motion to dismiss Apple's counterclaims. Nokia argues that Apple is only trying to divert attention away from the real issue:

"Try as it might, Apple cannot change the fact that a license offer does not become unlawful simply because one of the parties finds it subjectively unacceptable".

Nokia also points out that Apple's claims are paradoxical, i.e first Apple claims that Nokia has a monopoly on wireless standards and then argues that Nokia's patents aren't valid. Nokia, again, states that it's offers included fees purely on monetary basis and it didn't try to force Apple into crosslicensing.

“Through what charitably could be called an attempt at legal alchemy, Apple employs revisionist history, misleading characterizations, unsupported allegations and flawed and contradictory legal theories to turn these fruitless negotiations into a multi-count federal lawsuit for antitrust violations, breach of contract, promissory estoppel and declaratory judgment.”


Mainstream media links: Businessweek, Reuters


At least one lawyer got a sweet 32% raise last year despite recession, even if he doesn't practise law currently.




EDIT: Forgot to add that Apple has shaved four patents off from it's complaints against Nokia (13--->9 patents). Apple legal not doing it's homework properly?

This all just sound stupid, patent right? BS......waste of time.

so if someone pioneer to create a phone with touch screen, no one can allow to creates a touchscreen phone?? BS!!!. then where to touch??? so phone that used push button, now your phone cannot have push button??? crazy.....

Two developments worth mentioning in ITC case. One because it's funny and other one because it involves N900/Maemo. Have you ever wondered if lawyers of a multibillion dollar corporation would use something as flaky as Wikipedia for evidence against multibillion euro corporation? Read on if you have.

One of Apple's patents that Nokia is supposedly infringing is 'Real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data (Patent 6343263)'. It's DSP related patent and according to Apple's complaint the Freescale chip MXC300-30 in N97 includes StarCore digital signal processor that infringes the before mentioned patent. Trouble for Apple is that N97 doesn't actually have Freescale MXC300-30! Nokia was puzzled how Apple could make such a claim because Apple could have just opened up a N97 to see that it doesn't have this chip, or as Nokia puts it "Apple never tested the N97, disassembled it, reversed engineered it, or otherwise confirmed whether it included infringing structure or functionality”. So what was Apple's evidence for N97 having a MXC300-30? At first Apple wasn't willing to tell, but Nokia's lawyers kept pressing that Apple has legal responsibility to provide evidence for it's claims. Finally Apple's lawyers gave two documents. One of them was 4 year old press release, which stated that Nokia and Freescale are cooperating in DSP development, but it had nothing to do with N97. The other source of information was based on...Wikipedia and Wikipedia user called “Evil Genius”... I can only imagine the laughter when that document was revealed.

"It appears that an anonymous Internet user, the self-named “Evil Genius,” changed the cited Wikipedia page to state that the N97 uses the accused Freescale chip and processor (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...M_architecture &diff=prev&oldid=271814288, attached hereto as Exh. D). “Evil Genius” is wrong and cites no documentation or other support for this misstatement."..."The only thing more remarkable than Wikipedia’s false statement that the N97 includes a Freescale chip is that Apple relied on it to file its Complaint."

This brings two questions to my mind. Just how incompetent is lawyer/legal team that uses “Evil Genius” as source for evidence and how the hell do they got job representing Apple? Nokia has filed motion to dismiss patent 6343263 from the ITC case.

Nokia's new court paper also includes motion to dismiss the only patent that involved N900/Maemo (System and method for managing power conditions within a digital camera device, patent 5920726). This is camera functionality related patent that involves communication between CPU and camera power management circuitry. Nokia says that N900's camera functions don't operate in the manner described in the patent, and Apple could have easily found this out by downloading Maemo source code from maemo.org. There's lot of technical proof for this, which goes way over my head (summary below).

“This publicly accessible source code confirms that the accused processor does not use information from the accused PRM_IRQENABLE_MPU register because no such information is ever sent to the processor (see Exh. E, Kristo Decl. at ¶¶3-4). Simply put, the processor in the N900 cannot use the information to control the operation of the digital camera because it never gets information from the PRM_IRQENABLE_MPU register.”


No web-page/blog link cause (afik) this hasn't been posted anywhere. Took couple of screenshots from the court PDF files to proof that Evil Genius isn't my own invention.

Latest events from ITC.

ITC's investagive staff has filed report about partly consolidating the investigations in Apple vs Nokia and Apple vs HTC cases into one. This would involve five overlapping patents in both cases. Nokia and HTC support it, but Apple is strongly opposed. No decision from judge yet. HTC and Nokia together somehow succeeding against Apple would propably cause spontaneous combustions amongst various fanboi populations around the world.

Nokia is also trying to arrange Markman hearing for Nokia vs Apple. This could potentially speed up the ITC trial or increase pressure for settlement.

Any updates on this?

Apple responded to Nokia's claims and counterclaimed late last month (thanks Groklaw):

http://www.groklaw.net/pdf2/ApplevHTC-19-1-2.pdf

Interestingly the N900 is mentioned specifically as infringing on three of the counterclaimed patents...

The '647 patent:
The '981 patent:
The '905 patent:
Reading the response it seems to me to imply that Nokia were seeking licences from Apple to these (and the other mentioned) patents in a cross-licensing deal. This suit seems to be the result of those talks breaking down.