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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

There should be a huge amount of prior art for this? Surely before yoga glo there must be ONE video with the same angle?

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less than 20 seconds of youtube searching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOt35-GQ_8w

That looks pretty close (although I can't tell if the camera is at a height of 3 feet), but it was uploaded in 2011. This patent has a priority date of 27 Aug 2010, so to invalidate this patent, any videos like this from before that date would be needed.

The patent says "about 3 feet" instead of 3 feet, and while that's vague enough to be stupid they've helpfully provided images of their classes that represent a camera at that height in the post. Skimming that video it looks to be a very close match.

I'd be interested to know whether arguments used defending against prior art are legally binding afterward. For example if they said "nope, the camera looks to be 1m, not 3ft", would they be unable to consider something at 1m infringement forever?

> I'd be interested to know whether arguments used defending against prior art are legally binding afterward. For example if they said "nope, the camera looks to be 1m, not 3ft", would they be unable to consider something at 1m infringement forever?

Yes, it's called estoppel [1] which, amongst other things, basically means, "whatever you say can and will be used against you". This includes whatever comments and arguments they made during prosecution of the patent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel

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