[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.

[noirbot]

It's not trickery, it's a question of what the law is. If you grab a random person off the street, even simple machines like gears and pulleys may not be obvious. On the other end, you risk running into the "it's an auction but on a computer" patents just because you happen to be the first person to bother paying to patent that you could do that with a computer.

There's a difference between novel and niche in my mind. If you're working for a company that's acquired a monopoly on having enough money to do any work at all on some product, simply because there's not enough demand for it to have active competition, that doesn't seem like it should mean that everything is "novel" just because you're the only group thinking about it. Yes, in this case Apple is the much bigger company deciding to get into the business, but these patents surely would likewise hinder other companies from competing, or even doing their own research into product innovations in this area, for fear of being too close to the existing patents.

Either way, my point was about hiring people, not the patents. Going "they poached all these people so they could steal their patented knowledge" may be true, but if that company is the only company doing any amount of real innovation in that field, you'd also want to hire from them just because you want to hire the best engineers who have experience with those sensors. Even if you were trying to avoid any issue with patent and totally build a unique product, you'd still want to start with people who know the problem space vs. re-training people.

[ajross]

> Even if you were trying to avoid any issue with patent and totally build a unique product, you'd still want to start with people who know the problem space vs. re-training people.

Sorry, that's ridiculous. If you were genuinely trying to avoid IP pollution, hiring employees from existing market leaders is the worst possible strategy.

Again, people are twisting themselves around here. Apple got caught red handed here. Argue, if you must, that the patent is invalid from first principles and that any staff could have done it. But the fact that they went and hired all these folks to do it in the real world absolutely constitutes strong evidence to the contrary.

[noirbot]

See, I feel like that's almost the exact opposite unless you assume Apple and its internal legal department is made up of the biggest idiots on the planet. If they were intending on just infringing this valid patent and trying to get away with it, then they've literally handed the world a paper trail that makes them look as bad as possible without a literal email being published in the newspaper from Tim Cook saying "Yea, just violate the patent".

With the history they have with Masimo, surely the more reasonable explanation is that they saw the tech, thought they could make something independently that was as good or better without infringing the patent, and hired off some of the Masimo folks to help with explicit instructions to try to avoid any overlap with their old patents?

Does Apple have some history of flagrantly violating patents I don't know about? If anything, other folks have pointed out that Apple specifically has done this to other people before, so they're keenly aware of the risks here. I just don't buy what seems to be the conventional wisdom of "haha big company is dumb as bricks". Risking getting a flagship product banned from sale seems deeply unlike Apple's business strategy in general, which makes everyone's assertions that this infringement was intentional, flagrant, and obvious to a layman seem like it must have some fault in it.