Comment on The Patent Office Is About To Make Bad Patents Untouchable
FatCrab@slrpnk.net 2 days agoWhat is described in the second point is literally how Design Patent claims work. They don’t work the same way as utility patents. Anyway, yea, people not knowing how patents actually work aside, leadership at the USPTO is currently fucked.
chaogomu@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The point is that design patents are fucking stupid and should not exist in the first place.
Apple has sued other phone manufacturers over them making a rectangle with rounded corners.
And it’s fucked.
FatCrab@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Design patents effectively work like brand protection. They literally only protect new aesthetics and ornamentation. The reality is that the iPhone did start the trend of rounded corner rectangular touchscreen phones. When it first came out, it was a fairly novel form factor for a phone. It didn’t prevent other form factors from being released. Like, the fact that it is now so ubiquitous that we take for granted smartphones look this way is a testament to its success. And, actually, plenty of phones did right angle screen corners. Design Patents are extraordinarily narrow things and, among the many issues with the current USPTO and the US IP system in general, it is probably the absolutely least problematic piece.
Devial@discuss.online 14 hours ago
“They’re extradonarily narrow” whilst literally talking about an apple patent that covers ANY type of digital display device whatsoever that has rounded corners.
That’s not even close to “extremely narrow” in scope.
architect@thelemmy.club 22 hours ago
I would argue the old brick phones did it first. Apple just made it thinner.