German court turkey-slaps Motorola in patent case

The usual Florian Müller trolling shite, but apart from that...

...how are these patents enforceable in Germany in the first place? Isn't that a country of progress and staid innovation in which these kind of patent faggotry are not valid?

A fundamental problem

with modern patent cases is the presumption of validity of the patent. This was reasonable in the days when patent offices were a branch of government, staffed by skilled civil servants, whose role was to examined patent applications on behalf of the public. Once these organisations became effectively private agencies, needing to process greater numbers of applications to ensure their revenue, the only thing that they can be regarded as authoritative for is the date of filing. Patent Offices must now be regarded alongside patent agents, and lawyers as part of the patent industry, with a vested interest in granting more, and obscure patents, rather than as a source of authoritative, non-partisan expertise.

As the courts have become the arbiters of patent validity (a role abrogated by the patent offices), they should approach each case without any presumptions, and with regard to the statutory law and regulations at the time of filing the patent. Case precedent may have a bearing on subsequent damages, etc but should not be part of the examination for patent validity. Skilled patent examiners should be employed as expert witnesses to the court. If this seems expensive, it is the price we should pay in return for the "savings" gained by the privatisation of the patent offices.

The EPO has been particularly aggressive in abusing its position to grant dubious patent; particularly software patents, even thought they have been specifically rejected by the European Parliament. None of their patents should be regarded as valid per se. Manufacturers who have been harmed by wrongly granted patents should be able to claim damages from the negligent patent office. If a patent applicant misrepresents their case to the patent office, that should be treated in the same way as other fraudulent claims to e.g. government tax and benefit offices.

Just silly.

Is two finger zoom next? Or some other insignificant piece of UI frill?

I forsee an underground OS emerging that gives all the features a user wants, doesn't track users, has no fed backdoors and, maybe I'm just dreaming, just fucking works.

Sorry, rant over, it's been an allnighter.

Its just bloody stupid.

You should not be able to patent anything unless you can touch it or its a method for producing something solid.

Everything else should be under copyright laws, it would then be a simple process on all these, if what you have in the UI is something never done before seen before or your code has been coppied etc then you can seek compensation and the removal of the infringment, ie this bounce thing, if it was copyrighted and has never been seem before then Apple could seek damages for infringment and demand its removed from products via a software update.

It should not be possible to get kit banned from sale etc just over something as stupid as this.

To be honest...

anything that gets rid of ridiculous 'end of scroll' bounce is fine with me. It's just a shame it needs these courtroom shenanigans to do it, rather than customer complaint.

Does anyone actually think 'I wonder how much longer the battery would last *without* all the eye candy animations'?

Did anyone in the world actually buy a motorola device because it had a scroll bounce? Did motorola market it? How did that affect apple sales at all?

Seriously, whatever about copying exterior design or claiming to copy a UIs design, the scroll bounce is such an insignificant feature that nobody except Apple cares about it.

Apple should be fucking ashamed of itself

I hope that the iPhone 5 is recalled and destroyed for LTE infringements.

...and that Google gets screwed over for forcing Acer to drop Alibabas software.

Mine is the one with two tin cans and a long piece of string in the pocket.

So, the teeny fact that this is part of the UI baked in with Android, and can be enabled/disabled by flashing an upgrade zip onto the ROM, means nothing to the court? (similar in fact, to, let's say, common sense?)

Let them try taking on Google directly, who provided the functionality as stock.....

Correction

"Florian Mueller at Foss Patents says “Android has far bigger patent infringement problems than any piece of computer software has ever had in the history of the industry”."

"Florian Mueller has far bigger reputation problems than any so-called patent industry expert has ever had in the history of the industry"

While I don't agree that such a ridiculous thing can be patented I still don't see why they don't do it the overscroll glow effect like my samsung phone does which I much prefer to the bounce back anyway. Its bat shit crazy that a court can order devices destroyed for such a teeny tiny trivial piece of nonsense.

Wow......

...the more you pay, the more severe the penalties? Why stop at forcing Motorola to destroy the offending tablets when, for a few million more you can request the senior executives to chop off their little fingers at the knuckle? I heard that, for another 50 million we can insisit on the CEO committing hara-kiri while for just 100 million Apple employees can eat the Motorola Management Board's first-born children in front of them with a nice crisp salad.