However, as your link notes, the measure of recovery wouldn't be the same as if the contract existed, since there would've been no negotiation and awarding full use of the work would be unjust enrichment. Instead, a court would probably say that there are no royalties due for past infringement, but that you don't get an unlimited right going forward to keep using the work.

The police report you linked says that they were distributed in a podcast on 09/20/14. It also says the restraining order was issued on 09/16/14. Now, I'm no mathematician, but I do believe that 9/16 is before 9/20, not after.

Or are you arguing that the police report you provided is fake?

Nope, read it. You claimed - and I quote - she "claimed that he and Milo, are part of some professional doxxing organization." I responded that the word "professional" doesn't appear there. Are you now backpedaling on that and admitting that she's only claiming that he's part of a group that doxxes people? Or do you want to double down and claim that use of the word "organization" automatically means it's professional?

Do you have a copy of the transcript? I can't find one online, so I can't verify. Also, depending on the wording of the restraining order, a judge is still going to crack down on Gjoni if he tries to pull a "I didn't reveal her personal information, the person sitting to my right (reading the note I passed him) revealed her personal information".

First, got a link? Second, I'm not sure how this is relevant to what we're discussing. Is there any claim that Quinn was the doxxer?
Incidentally, if by Gjoni's lawyer, you mean Mike Cernovich, I really hope he's not claiming to be Gjoni's lawyer, because he's not a member of the Massachusetts Bar, and unlicensed practice of law can get him huge sanctions.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. You can't provide a citation because you're afraid of being doxxed?

First, your link doesn't say what you claim it says. The word "professional" never appears anywhere in there, nor "paid", "compensation", or anything else that might imply it was a professional organization.

Second, the police report indicates that the restraining order forbid any posting of her personal information by Gjoni. But, as you admit, Gjoni spread internet links to nude pictures of her. Regardless of who put them up initially, it certainly seems like you're admitting he violated the restraining order.

Restraining orders are explicit orders to not do certain things. If you do them, you're in deep shiat, even if they seem to make no sense at the time. For example, when people with restraining orders who are told to stay away from each other due to a domestic fight later reconcile and get back together without first going to a court and having the order withdrawn go to jail. If the order tells Gjoni not to post any personal information about Quinn, and he posts a copy of a white pages entry naming her, he's still in violation of the order. There's no "sure, I posted personal information, but other people did too" or "sure I posted personal information, but it wasn't secret" defenses. You simply can't do it, or you're in violation.

Say what? GG's supporters include writers at Breitbart, Ed Morrisey at Hot Air, conservative Adam Baldwin, Christina Hoff Sommers, etc. This is Tea Party-style "libertarians" and conservatives against progressives.

FTFY. HTH. HAND.

[Citation needed]

They're both SATA Blu-Ray drives. Seems like it should be possible, but would need a SATA data splitter (which doesn't exist), or a switch to flip all of the data pins between each motherboard. In SATA, that's only really 4 pins, since the other three are ground, so a 4-pole 2-way switch should do it... but you'd be killing the shielding, common mode noise rejection between pairs, etc. at the switch. So, while theoretically, it might work, in practice it may just spit out drive errors. At least one advantage is that the SATA spec includes up to a 1m cable length, and you'd only need about 10 centimeters, tops.

First, because of the way the patent act is written - it says that if a patent application can't be shown to be obvious, then it will be issued. That makes sense logically, because proving that something is nonobvious after having disclosed it is going to be nigh-difficult if not impossible. What are you going to do, wipe everyone's memory and then quiz them?

Second, even disregarding that, I've already met the burden of proof - I provided evidence in the form of "you admitted this is valuable" and "this didn't exist". Together, that indicates it was probably not obvious, or someone would have done it. It's your turn to rebut it, with evidence, not just saying "it's clearly obvious".

The indicator I am using is the metric that the invention in question could have been invented even if the patent had not been granted. We can never know this in the absolute sense that we can't change the past and see how it affects the future, but I think reasonable people can agree that a blue and gold polka dot smartphone could be invented even without a patent

Of course the invention in question could have been invented - it was invented, or else we wouldn't be talking about it. Your indicator is essentially "this was invented, therefore it could have been invented, and since it could have been invented, no one had to invent it because it was obvious". That circular logic applies to everything from the space shuttle to cancer vaccines.

The implementation costs are negligible... the R&D costs - figuring out that it is an improvement, doing user testing, etc., are quite high compared to the implementation costs... and, I believe, that ratio was your metric indicating it should be patentable.

Well, there's a lot of shovelware out there, and not much in the way of new designs, you'll notice. It's starting to become like Atari in the 80s.

However, once you can buy a Ferrari and take it apart, it's pretty easy to copy with a machine shop and some skilled workers. And since we're not talking about the engine, but the UI, it's even easier to make a body case of a Ferrari and build a fiberglass look-alike. I'd give a Hollywood special effects shop a week, tops.

Similarly, I'd give a team of Russian hackers a week or two to reverse engineer any UI you build, even if it took you months and months of trial and error and alternate designs to come up with the best one.

You're confusing "new" and "nonobvious" - they're actually two different statutes. If something has never been done before, then it's new, by definition. However, if all of the pieces of it had been done separately and they could be readily combined, then it's obvious, even though it's new. Peanut butter sandwiches are known; tuna fish sandwiches are known. Maybe no one ever put them together, because yech, so it's "new", but it's also an "obvious" combination of known elements.

But if the patent claim was peanut butter + tuna + [previously unknown substance], then that's not obvious, no matter how obvious peanut butter + tuna would be.

In the definition above, the UI designers come up with new aspects, which others than copy. Those new aspects haven't been done before. When the resulting UI is "known aspect" + "known aspect" + new aspect, then it's not obvious.

I'm pointing to the idea of popularity of an invention being nonobvious as an indicator that the idea was also nonobvious. And as of yet, you have pointed to no indicators as to whether something is obvious.

Tell that to Zynga, or any of the indie designers they've ripped off.

On the contrary, it's pretty easy.

But they also come up with new aspects, which is why the UIs are evolving. Those new aspects that others copy, because they believe they're the best aspects, must not have been obvious, or they would already have been incorporated - since, as you say, they're acknowledged as the "best".

Not exactly... I'm asserting the claim that if no one has done something yet and it's commercially valuable to do so, then it's likely not obvious. Evidence of that is the fact that if it was obvious, someone would have taken the free money. Because no one has, that implies no one thought of it.
You're disputing this by saying "no, it's plainly obvious." Well, that's a fine conclusion, but where's your evidence?

Sure, let's go with that - the price of copying software is negligible, while the price of designing it is comparatively huge. In fact, the copying price is so small - a click and drag, in one scenario - that the ratio approaches or exceeds that of pharmaceuticals, where at least you have to make a physical product. So, software should be patentable, and expensive machines may not be patentable, depending on how closely the cost to build them approaches or exceeds the design cost.

Kinect came out in Nov. 2010. It seems like you're admitting that it wasn't obvious until at least then, no?

Was it? Here's the thing - you already admitted this was valuable. If making a smartphone in gold and blue polka dots meant that your profit would increase and you knew it, wouldn't you do it? Of course you would, you're a smart guy who likes money.
Or, conversely, if making a smartphone in gold and blue polka dots meant that your profit would increase and you didn't know it, then that would explain why you didn't do it.
So, when someone subsequently comes out with a gold and blue polkadot phone and their sales shoot up, you can't very well say "pff, that's obvious, I knew about that all along... I just didn't do it because I hate making money" and expect to be believed.

Why would you spend hundreds of thousands or millions on UI design to create and test a UI only to have some other company copy it and undercut you? In fact, why would you spend any money on research, if someone can just steal yours freely (and you can steal theirs)?

Actually, I'm trying to guide you towards addressing the patent claims, rather than some vague gist of the idea... The claims are the only part of the patent that matters, not the title, not the abstract, etc. In order to call the claims obvious, you have to show that all of the elements in the claims existed in the prior art and could be reasonably combined by someone of skill in the art. Saying "mice exist and can do gestures" is a useful first step, but the claims recite a sensor that receives "a set of multiple 3D coordinates representing a gesture by a hand positioned within a field of view of a sensing device" and I'm sure you'll readily agree that a mouse doesn't do that.

Did you do that before 2011?

Probably not after the Microsoft Kinect, actually.

Except that you haven't proven it... You've said mice exist, sure, but I'm sure you'll also admit that a mouse doesn't actually read on this. You've said there are well-known protocols and scripts and that it's very frequently used... But just saying "prior art exists" doesn't mean anything unless you can actually name that prior art: which protocols? Which scripts?

But was it at the time? The Kinect was released in Nov. 2010. This patent is from early 2011. It may be obvious now, but you can only prove that by showing prior art that existed at the time.

Copyright isn't useful for protecting code. See, e.g. Dream Heights/Tiny Tower, Farmville/Farm Town, Candy Crush Saga/dozens of similar games, MS Office/Open Office, etc., etc. It's great when people want that specific thing, like the latest Avengers movie rather than a Bollywood superhero movie, or Harry Potter rather than "Larry Kotter, Boy Wizard", but it's useless when the software is fungible.

Not sure if serious. You can't get a trademark or copyright on a gesture.

And yet, no one had anything like it before swipe-to-unlock came out, and lots of people immediately copied it. That indicates it wasn't stupidly obvious prior to Apple's disclosure of it.

As noted above, if you write your own code to do that, you don't violate copyright. Copyright is useless for 90% of software. It only works in cases where there are proprietary formats of data, so you need to get the specific program rather than a competitor's, and lack of interoperability is a bad thing for consumers.

If you're rent seeking, you're not inhibiting competition - i.e. if you're receiving royalties for your patent, then someone must be practicing it.
No, Apple wants this patent to force competitors to come up with other ways of doing the same thing, because Apple believes theirs is more intuitive and will be preferred by consumers. I doubt they would ever grant a license to this patent.

Yes, and? No one is claiming Apple invented cameras or gestures. Remember, you have to focus on the claims of the patent, not just "it's a patent on gestures, so if I find any mention of a gesture, I've invalidated it."

Is it? If so, why don't we have it already in products?

Prove it - explain why it was so obvious that people already knew about it, but no one bothered making it.

Then someone would have made it. Free money on the table, right? They already have the idea, it's valuable to make even without a patent, so you should be able to point to at least one product including it...

Unless, of course, it wasn't obvious.

Patents only on things that aren't valuable to produce? Why would people buy them? Or are you suggesting that with a patent will also come a mandate forcing the public to buy products they don't want? Please, we don't do that in this c-... well, we don't do that for anything except insurance.

Mice are certainly sensing devices, but they don't receive "a set of multiple 3D coordinates representing a gesture by a hand positioned within a field of view of a sensing device" as recited by the patent claim.

By "doing this for a while", you may mean "doing something vaguely similar, but lacking the steps explicitly recited in the patent claim", which is why those don't invalidate the claim.

Sure, it is, because you just read a Slashdot story telling you the idea. If I tell you a joke, then turn around and tell you the setup again, the punchline is "obvious" because you just heard it. The question is not whether something is obvious after it has been explained to you, but whether it's obvious before. Or specifically, whether the invention was obvious at the time of filing the patent application, and not after you've read all about it.

Why not? Clearly, it's not so clear to Congress, so what's your reasoning as to why this is not in the spirit of driving innovation?

Respectfully, that question is a bit naive. Patents aren't really about encouraging innovation, they're about encouraging public disclosure of innovations, as opposed to keeping them under trade secret or restrictive contracts. Without patents, would a company still invent this? Sure, it seems to be a commercially valuable advantage over a device lacking it. What would they do instead? Have purchasers sign non-reverse engineering contracts, non-disclosure agreements, restrictions on sales, etc. And those contracts could actually grant more rights than patents, since there's nothing to say they'd have to expire after 20 years or wouldn't include the first sale doctrine or patent exhaustion, nor could they be invalidated by prior art, etc., etc.

The question "is it more valuable to make this than not" drives innovation. Patents drive adding those innovations into the public domain, which eliminates the need for every competitor to waste time reinventing the same thing.