[p-diddy @ Aug 30th 2006 4:57PM]

*sigh* I hate to be the voice of reason here, but whether you think the Zen patent is novel and non-obvious is not really an issue. Apple settled for $100 million. Take a minute and chew on this: if there was ANY WAY Apple could have shown prior art that meets the legal standard to invalidate the Zen patents, or show how obvious it was at the time the patent was filed, and it would have cost them less than $100 million to do so, don't you think they would have done so?

Here's a bit o' information for you: a patent lawsuit, run by very expensive attorneys, will cost you about $2 million to take it all the way through trial. That means that Apple didn't think they would be able to find prior art even if they spent an extra $98 million lookng for it. While the PTO may issue some questionable patents here and there, if something is not novel or is obvious, it's challengeable in court. Apple apparently didn't think it was worth the risk and paid out $100 million. That means they were pretty scared of losing, which likely means they couldn't find anything to invalidate it.

Patents are found invalid all the time (well, depending on where you filed the lawsuit (I'm looking at you Eastern division of Texas)). Apple didn't think they could win this.

And I bet not a single person here has actually looked at the claims of the patent. They just think that the concept is obvious, so the patent is invalid. Yeah, it's dick to say, but probably 90% of the people here don't know jack about patent law, so seriously, before posting, please consider how ignorant you're going to sound to people that do. Yes, we read engadget too.

-p-