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Unless you are a patent lawyer/expert specifically in someone's employ, pointing out that in your layman's opinion that "something appears to be patented" isn't doing anyone any favors, and may in fact be harming them. Patents use their own specific, strange language. The claims, as modified by other precedents, only apply in certain specific situations which may be different than what a casual reading would imply. And, for any of dozens of reasons the holder may not be interested in ever trying to enforce the patent. So simply by raising the possibility, causing attention to be drawn, and uninformed discussions to be spawned, people's time is being wasted. If they become uneasy, or start spending engineering effort to 'work around' something that they hardly understand and that may never be enforced, more time is wasted. And by getting more eyes on the fuzzy patent, you may have put more people/projects at risk of treble damages for 'willful infringement', in the rare case where the patent is actually enforced later, or undermined their ability to make a case for obviousness (because many teams came up with the same approach without seeing the patent). The better policy is to ignore such "appears to be patented" reports, unless and until there's a credible threat from the holder(s) to enforce in specific ways, as checked by experts. Let these patents (and panicked overbroad interpretations) wither away in unenforced obscurity. |