That statistic tells you absolutely nothing about the validity (or otherwise) of the patents involved in litigation.
The numbers would include the successful bringing of an infringement action with respect to a perfectly valid patent, for example.
A declaration of invalidity is far from the only remedy available in patent litigation.
Good thing this is exactly the case, then!
Look up "sufficiency" and "enablement" - lacking sufficient information for the person of ordinary skill in the art to work the claimed invention is grounds for invalidity in the US and other jurisdictions.
This is somewhat redundant as the excellent post preceding mine is absolutely correct, but: you have gotten this entirely backwards.
If you would like proof, you can actually read all communications between the USPTO and the applicant (or, more usually, their agent/attorney) on the USPTO PAIR service. There is a time lag between new applications being filed and all such information being available online, but it gets there eventually.
If you look at any of the communications between the patent examiner and the applicant/attorney during the examination process, you'll find that the examiner raises objections based on specific claims.
For example, a Non-Final Rejection to the patent application which eventually became the granted patent in the OP was issued on the 27th June 2011. To quote just one sample part from that: "Claims 1-10 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103(a) as being unpatentable over Deering US Patent No. 6,115,047 in light of [other relevant prior art]..." followed by a detailed argument of why the cited prior art anticipates the specific claims in question.
The big downside to the USPTO PAIR system is that it presents all the correspondence in a horrible pdf wrapper and it has a horrible habit of kicking you out for prolonged inactivity, but it's a good resource for people who are genuinely interested in reading the arguments for and against a given application, what prior art was cited and why, and the arguments which were used to overcome citations.
You could have a stimulus which was applied at below the threshold level to be detectable by a person, but is still having an effect on the system in question. That would qualify as an imperceptible stimulus.
Right, but reading on to claim 4 of the patent: "An apparatus... wherein the magnetic field originates from an electronic device and relates to digital content stored in the electronic device."
That's nowhere near the same thing as a simple subdermal ferromagnetic implant.
Claim 1 in the published application is probably broad enough that the stuff in the linked article would be novelty-destroying, but published patent applications aren't the same as granted patents, and in fact will have deliberately have been drafted broadly as a starting point for examination. Something with claim 4 incorporated into claim 1 is nowhere near anticipated by subdermal ferromagnetic implants alone.
"Prior art" doesn't mean "somebody once came up with this idea in the abstract so you can't have a patent on it".
For a piece of prior art to be novelty destroying it has to provide enough information for the ordinary skilled person to implement the teachings of the patent in their entirety. Seeing it in a video game doesn't provide you with the technical information to implement a ferromagnetic tattoo which displays different information based off data received from a mobile device.
The scope is crucial.
The inventor may only screw around the rest of the industry and stifle innovation within the breadth of the patent's claims (as read within the context of the description).
Hence, an arguably trivial patent which is very narrow in scope is pretty much only damaging to the reputation of the patent system which granted it, because the protection conferred isn't anywhere near broad enough to cause a genuine nuisance to anyone.
Whether there is or not is pretty much irrelevant, because the patent in the OP isn't claiming anything near as broad as menued multikeys generally, or graphical onscreen keyboards generally.
Scope is determined by what is in the claims, read in the context of the description. When construed in that manner, it's pretty narrow in scope.
This is going to get lost as a reply to an AC, but whatever:
1) the filing date of that patent isn't 2007, it's 2005.
2) the patent in the linked article is a continuation of US6987991, and hence inherits its filing date, which is 17th August 2001.
That is the date at which novelty and obviousness is to be assessed. I'm not commenting on whether or not that was a common feature in 2001 (I have no idea!), just pointing out the error.
"The Committee adopted the amended Commission proposal and the draft legislative resolution by 22 votes in favour and 1 abstention"
"The patent system is supposed to be setup so that if a skilled practitioner looks at patented invention he'll say "damn, how did they implement that?"."
This is subtly incorrect, though. Most inventive step tests are based around the idea of asking if the ordinary skilled person would arrive at the solution provided by the patented invention *without* knowledge of it. That is, to look at the prior art, look at the problem to be solved, and then determining if the ordinary skilled person armed with common general knowledge and knowledge of the prior art would (would, not could) arrive at the patented solution.
I have no opinion on whether or not the patents in the article do or do not satisfy that criteria, and I appreciate that your third paragraph is more in line with this approach, but I think it's an important distinction to make.
Modded +4 Informative for reciting the titles of a bunch of patents without any insight on their actual content. Sheesh.
NO!
This is another of those hugely common misconceptions on Slashdot around how patents work (right up there with what the term "prior art" actually means).
The only difference between a "first to file" and "first to invent" system is what happens when two (or more) parties come up with the same invention (near-)simultaneously. Under "first to invent", you would enter into costly interference proceedings and the rights would be awarded to the person who demonstrated that they were the first to conceive of an invention and reduce it to practice. This is not straightforward to do, and can be complicated by issues of due dilligence in reducing the idea to conception.
Under "first to file", you ignore that question and simply refer to who was the first person to file an application. Interference proceedings are gone.
It has ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT on prior art; an invention must be new, involve an inventive step, not be excluded subject matter (although this is narrow in the US) and be capable of industrial applicability (very low threshold test, but mentioned for completeness' sake) to be patentable.
I have to start with a disclaimer: it depends from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and I'm much more familiar with European and UK standards of obviousness.
The brief answer is that there has been precedent to suggest that identifying a technical problem to solved can itself be inventive. Put very broadly, something like "I want to make product X be better" isn't an objective technical problem to be solved, it's a desired outcome. But identifying a way in which to make product X better, followed by a means to implement it, may be non-obvious. The larger contribution in that case might well have been the identification of the problem, but that itself could have been inventive ("inventive" and "non-obvious" are used more or less interchangeably).
My favourite example is the Anywayup Cup (Google it - also a great example of how patents can be enormously beneficial to the little guy). Anyone who's had a child (I'm told!) knows that kids spilling juice is a problem. The Anywayup Cup is a sippy-cup which, essentially, has a valve flush with the sipping portion. If you framed that problem as "I want a way to stop liquid from leaking out of the apperture in a sippy-cup" then that's an obvious solution. But that wasn't the objective technical problem to be solved; the problem to be solved was "I want a way to stop kids making a mess when drinking juice", and identifying the technical means to do so was the lion's part of the inventive step there.
(there was more to this particular case than that - for example, there's the "long-felt want" argument here, because kids making an unholy mess with juice isn't exactly a new problem, so why hadn't a solution been presented before? This is not enough to demonstrate inventiveness, but it may contribute depending on the circumstances.)
Both the UK and the European Patent Offices have pseudo-objective tests for assessing obviousness - the Pozzoli/Windsurfing test and the Problem and Solution approach, respectively. Common to both is ensuring that the problem to be solved is identified, the relevant skilled person is identified, and - arguably most importantly of all - the avoidance of hindsight. Nearly everything's obvious in hindsight.
The change from first to invent to first to file doesn't have anything to do with the consideration of prior art.
The solution of this problem is trivial and is left as an exercise for the reader.
