A new patent related to Project Glass could give us an idea of how Google plans to merge the high-tech eyewear with our everyday lives, and it’s a pretty damn cool concept. Using everything from built in sensors and connectivity like RFID and Bluetooth to visual identifiers like QR codes, Glass could detect everyday objects [...]
A long, long time ago, in the world we currently live in, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was established. For 60 years, it has ruled over the mostly unchanged laws of all patents concerning the United States of America. On March 16, 2013, everything will change (sort of). Remember last year when [...]
The current patent system “over-rewards” the easy part of innovation — coming up with an idea — while taxing the hard part of implementing it.
That’s what a senior patent attorney for Google, Suzanne Michel, …
A newly published patent is giving us one of the more detailed looks into Google’s Project Glass to date. The filing comes a day after Google opened applications for their Glass Explorer program to members of the general public. Shown among the pages of the document are detailed illustrations of the Glass headset we have [...]
Recent weeks have seen speculation intensify around the idea of an Apple iWatch, and today a patent application from the Cupertino company has revealed a device that bears a striking resemblance to what you might expect an App…
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has recommended that the US Patent Office require applicants to submit working code with their software patent applications. This would help stop patent trolls from abusing broad softwa…
The US Patent and Trademark Office has approved Apple’s request to trademark the design and layout of its iconic retail stores — stores that other US companies have tried in recent years to imitate. Apple had to fight to…
The United States Department of Justice is wondering what part of “standard essential patents” tech companies don’t understand. Per Reuters, the DOJ and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this week put out a joint policy statement saying that companies should only be entitled to modest monetary compensation if others use their standard essential patents, and that they shouldn’t use those patents to seek outright sales bans of rivals’ products. The agencies’ reassertion of this principle is notable because Google (GOOG) last week agreed to stop using the standard essential patents acquired from Motorola in offensive patent lawsuits against competitors. Standard essential patents, for those who don’t know, cover key technologies that entire industries need to use in order to operate.
Many people had a good laugh when Samsung (005930) unveiled the Galaxy Note last year and made a big deal out of the device’s Palm Pilot-like stylus. But once the Galaxy Note became a hit, people stopped snickering and began to take the stylus seriously as an accessory once again. Apple (AAPL) is apparently considering hopping on the stylus bandwagon, as HotHardware reports that the company has filed a patent for a pen accessory it describes as an “active stylus” that “can either act as a drive electrode to create an electric field between the drive electrode and the sense lines of a mutual capacitive touch sensor panel, or as a sense electrode for sensing capacitively coupled signals from one
We’ve seen a lot of ridiculous claims asserted by patent trolls over the past few years, but this one truly takes the cake: Ars Technica reports that an entity called “Project Paperless LLC” has been sending out letters to small and medium-sized businesses demanding licensing fees for using office scanners capable of sending PDFs via email. Steven Vicinanza, founder of Atlanta-based IT services provider BlueWave Computing, told Ars that both his company and several of its customers had received letters telling them that they needed to buy licenses for “distributed computer architecture” patents that cover basic networked scanning technology. At a cost of $1,000 per employee, Vicinanza said that the licenses would have cost his company a grand total of $130,000 just for the
