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Authored by: stegu on Monday, May 27 2013 @ 06:38 PM EDT |
And again, please consider all the prior art that has been demonstrated. Why do
you keep defending this? It's a losing battle. Even if you could convince
someone that this is not obvious (which I think it is, meaning that it would
appear as the first or second solution to a person reasonably skilled in user
interface design once you presented them with the problem), you will have a very
hard time arguing that it is novel, because it just isn't. It existed both as
computer implemented methods before the patent was applied for, and as real
world methods long before that.
A 1950's father comes home from work. One of his kids says "Dad, someone
named Alan from your office called when Mom was out." The father asks
"Did Alan say what he wanted?" "No." Seeing that it is now
past office hours, the man gets the telephone directory, and looks up the home
phone number of his colleague. Looking also at the address while he reads the
phone number, he realizes that Alan lives five houses further down the street,
and decides to take a walk there instead. This is very much what this patent
describes. The equivalence may not be perfect, but I believe a slightly
different scenario, possibly involving the man calling his office and talking to
a secretary who maintains a directory with more detailed information, could
provide a perfect one-to-one correspondence.
For so many of these "on a computer" method patents I see, there are
simple, obvious equivalents in the real world which nobody would consider
patentable. Computers are not magic. They just seem like magic to the
uninformed, and the uninformed have been given free reign for far too long in
the field of patents. It is time for it to stop.
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