[zamadatix]

I generally agree when how bogus this kind of thing usually is is brought up but in this case I'm not sure I can agree what happened here was fair play tarnished by misguided law after reading the backstory these past few weeks. The rub between the two here isn't pulse ox was used at all it's a specific implementation of a certain part of several patents Marino claims Apple stole when they were working together then abandoned the relationship. This isn't something where Apple did something obvious in a vacuum and suddenly a troll came out of the woodwork. "Prior work" doesn't mean someone did light based pulse ox before it means the specific implementation which improves it was already known and in use at the time the patent was filed, which is not the case here.

[Despegar]

There was no partnership as far as I know. Masimo met with Apple's M&A team, they didn't do a deal, then Apple hired Masimo employees to do it themselves.

This complaint of Apple meeting with some company and then stealing their technology is the narrative put forward by every company or VC that meets with Apple and doesn't result in an acquisition. As if it's impossible to know who to hire from LinkedIn, patents, knowledge of the field, etc.

[ajross]

> As if it's impossible to know who to hire from LinkedIn, patents, knowledge of the field, etc.

That's misunderstanding the argument: it's not "They poached our employees and that isn't fair!", it's "Clearly our technology was legitimate and innovative, they had to poach our employees to duplicate it!"

It's an argument toward the standing of the patent(s?), not a complaint of unfair trade practices.

[jhugo]

> That's misunderstanding the argument: it's not "They poached our employees and that isn't fair!", it's "Clearly our technology was legitimate and innovative, they had to poach our employees to duplicate it!"

This seems a pretty thin argument. Hiring some people who already successfully did it has a higher chance of success than hiring randos, even if they have to do a clean-room re-implementation. So of course you're going to hire them if you can.

[hnlmorg]

> This seems a pretty thin argument. Hiring some people who already successfully did it has a higher chance of success than hiring randos

You're basically agreeing to the GP's "thin" argument by saying you need people who already successfully did it to have a higher chance of succeeding.

> even if they have to do a clean-room re-implementation

You can't do a clean-room re-implementation if you're hiring people who already worked of the original implementation. Plus clean-room design only circumvents copyright claims. They don't defend against patents.

[ajross]

> This seems a pretty thin argument. Hiring some people who already successfully did it has a higher chance of success than hiring randos, even if they have to do a clean-room re-implementation.

That's... literally the argument. If the patent was obvious to a practitioner in the field, you wouldn't need to hire experts. And not just any experts, experts from the company that holds the patent in question!

Honestly this part of the argument seems pretty sound to me. Whether patents should have this kind of power on the whole is I think an excellent question. But given the system we have, as I see it Apple is screwed here. They're going to end up cutting a very big check to get out of this.

[noirbot]

Isn't the question what the "field" is? Does it have to be obvious to a random college grad in Electrical Engineering? Biomed Engineering? Someone who's worked in Medical devices before? Someone who's worked on any other Pulse/Ox before?

I can very easily see a case where it's obvious to anyone who's worked on this sort of device before, but only 1-2 companies make that sort of device, so if you want to hire someone to make that sort of device without starting from literally 0 experience, it would have to be from one of the few companies that have patents in that field.

Once you're talking about specific methods of accomplishing a specific task in a field, there aren't that many experts or practitioners.

[ajross]

> I can very easily see a case where it's obvious to anyone who's worked on this sort of device before, but only 1-2 companies make that sort of device

You don't win legal cases by resorting to semantic trickery. Clearly the spirit of the law is that "obviousness" should be interpreted generally. If you have some layer of minutiae only understood at an implementation level by a few dozen human beings, it's clearly going to look "novel" to everyone else.

Otherwise everyone in a patent case would throw some obscure genius on the stand to testify "Well, you see, this is totally obvious to me!" and win.