filing patents for something you didn't invent is not the law working as intended.
> with them and then try to hire their engineers
This doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant. Apple was trying to entire a new field so they hired people who already work in it
I don’t care particularly about Apple or their watches. Yet even Apple can’t win against a patent troll that means any smaller company would never be able to develop and sell their products without paying Masimo.
Optical pulse oximeters are an obvious incremental thing, and with zero knowledge of the space I don’t think it’s crazy to believe these would have come into existence on the same time frame with or without the existence of patents.
Virtually everything humans create or “discover” is an inevitability. We’re all just memetic LLMs, remixing stuff with mildly differing levels of variance. Originality is quaint pre-industrial human myth.
That said, Apple would have absolutely done the same thing if they had the patent. So I have zero sympathy for either party.
Don’t hate the player, hate the “artificially granted ownership over progress” game.
Einstein upended every other human beings notion of space and time. Copernicus also proposed something preposterous for his time. Would you say they just remixed stuff with mild variance?
When Einstein published his theory of Special Relativity, it did not contain any fact or formula that had not already existed previously in the works of Lorentz, Poincaré and many others. It was just a new and original point of view about which is the meaning of those known relationships (i.e. that it is the speed of light which is constant in all reference systems, while other quantities are variable, instead of making other choices about which quantities are constant and which are variable).
His contribution is actually very similar with that of Copernicus, who also did not provide any new fact or relationship, but just a new choice about which position should be considered constant, Sun's or Earth's. Both changes were very small compared with the existing knowledge, but they were very important for enabling further progress.
Every progress is really incremental and it adds very little over the existing body of knowledge, even if the addition is essential for any further progress and for improving the practical applications.
It had no influence on the theory of Special Relativity (1905).
Einstein is the one who changed the meaning of the word "tensor" to the meaning used today in most cases, when tensor means a general multi-dimensional quantity. I could not find any information about the reason why Einstein has chosen to make this change in terminology.
Before Einstein, "tensor" (a term introduced by Hamilton) was applied only to symmetric matrices (because general matrices can be decomposed into "versors", i.e. rotation matrices that rotate vectors and a "tensor", i.e. a symmetric matrix that stretches vectors).
While Ricci has invented the concept of tensor, he has not used the word "tensor". Nevertheless, because Einstein's theory had become extremely fashionable at the end of WWI, when Ricci's work has been translated and published in USA, the American editor has introduced the word "tensor" everywhere in the book and they added on the covers that this is the book needed to understand Einstein's tensor theory, in order to promote the sales of the book.
Thus, Ricci's calculus became known as tensor calculus, first in USA, then everywhere.
When the General Relativity was developed in 1917, the Ricci calculus was no longer recent, but it was 17 years old.
Therefore what the OP supposed, that there was an immediate causal relationship between these lines of work, is not true.
17 years old I think is quite recent given the gap between special and general (would you say no immediate connection between them because of the length of that gap?), and there were presumably other pieces involved.
Even though it's inevitable that someone will invest a lot of time to get us better TFT displays in form of IPS, it's very much favorable that he can reap some reward for it.
It's a bit of a gamble and is therefore supplanted by the trade secret and research grant systems, still it's a useful incentive to do cool stuff.
Especially in the distant past, there have been many patents that were really valuable and their inventors deserved to be rewarded.
The main problem is that today patents are granted far too easily. Most patents contain in their claims only things that any competent professional could discover independently after a few hours of thinking about how to solve a problem.
Other claims are for methods that have been known for a long time, but they were not applied for various reasons, e.g. of cost or efficiency, to the applications described in the patent. Then some unrelated technological progress happened, which may not be mentioned at all in the patent, which suddenly enabled the extension of the application domain of the old method, and then someone quickly filed a patent for the new combination of old methods.
Other claims are far too general and cover all the ways that everyone could list about how to solve a problem, even if most of them are not practical at present and the inventor would not be able to demonstrate any functional implementation, but they are inserted in the patent claims for the case that someone will discover in the future a suitable technology, when it will become possible to claim that it infringes the patent.
Many patents are just reformulations of much older patents, from decades ago, perhaps filed in other countries, but they use such an obfuscated language that it is difficult to determine that in fact the different patents claim the same things.
I have read many patents, but the most recent they are, the less likely it is to find in them anything that I consider innovative or that would justify in any way to consider the patent as valid.
Nevertheless, few individuals or companies would be able to bear the expenses and risks of trying to invalidate patents, so there are many examples when inferior technologies have been used for decades in order to circumvent bogus patents.
Moreover, the days when most patent owners used the patents as a direct source of revenue are long in the past. Today few patent owners are willing to license them at fair and non-discriminatory prices. Most use the patents only as a means to prevent competition.
Currently in the US, for better or worse, actual scrutiny happens when you try to claim infringement, not at application.
>Other claims are far too general and cover all the ways that everyone could list about how to solve a problem,
This is covered by the non-obvious clause.
>Today few patent owners are willing to license them at fair and non-discriminatory prices.
Plain wrong.
> the individual who does the invention gets a normal salary which they would've gotten anywhere doing anything
may no longer be true.
You're making it out like the individuals do not benefit from company's success. I'm saying that's not true, the continued existence of the company is a benefit to the individual.
While I don't think we should give courts and government-like agencies no scrutiny, I think I'm probably going to put greater weight on the ITC's decision than a random person on the internet who admits they have zero knowledge of the technology in question.
2) Train another LLM to throw patents at the first LLM and see what sticks.
3) Profit.
Except there doesn’t seem to be particularly innovative about those patents. Masimo just excepts to be rewarded for filling them..
> Masimo has been on the cutting edge of pulse-oximetry
Maybe because they built an artificial patent moat around themselves and no other company can compete?
Sure sure.
But no, that’s actually the hard part. Something Apple did manage to accomplish quite well though (just like many other smaller companies would be able to do if there were no trivial patents preventing them from doing that).
Philips and Siemens, of all companies, decided to partner and license the technology, and Apple decided they can toss them around.