Comment by shakna
2 days ago
12 of the 23 claims invalidated by being "obvious", in light of previous patents.
The rest invalidated against Apple, through "alternative claim construction". That is, Apple's reading of the patent and its specific claims, showed it was narrower in scope than their particular usage.
None of this seems really surprising, and whilst it does open the door for Apple, it probably doesn't much open the door for other implementations to flourish - not without a lawyer guiding your particular tech choices.
The patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10517484B2/en
Note how similar this is to the pulse oximeter, which was invented in Japan in 1972 and patented in the US in 2004.
https://www.nihonkohden.com/technology/aoyagi.html
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050049469A1/en
> Note how similar this is to the pulse oximeter, which was invented in Japan in 1972 and patented in the US in 2004.
How could an invention from 1972, which I assume was publically disclosed around that time, be patented in 2004?
Were the details kept secret for 32 years?
It's the same person in both patents, Takuo Aoyagi. You can register a patent in separate jurisdictions, because they're separate jurisdictions.
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See discussion on first-to-file: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43125638
The "clock" does not start when the invention happens, which is anyway a very hard thing to pin down. But as you say, it creates very counter intuitive results.
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Because the patent system is broken
It must have been different in some key way, or the 1972 invention lacked several key improvements that the 2004 patent claimed.
I haven’t looked at the patent documents, but I’d bet money it’s not the same. The later US patent is probably for an improvement on the original device.