• @ReallyActuallyFrankenstein
    link
    4
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    No offense, but I think you’re just being dazzled by patent-style writing. For whatever it’s worth on an anonymous Internet forum, I’ve written patents, and litigated patents, related to analogous compression technology.

    It is not difficult to write something that sounds complex and novel in a patent, but is in fact a completely obvious, generic solution that any person of skill in the art would immediately and inevitably have upon confronting a task or problem. The patent examiners are overworked, underpaid, and every patent attorney knows this. Thousands of patents are granted that should not be granted every year, because after a few office actions and responses, high-paid attorneys inevitably make it too time-consuming for the patent examiners to fight.

    And while yes, sometimes tech companies steal tech, you should also be verrrry suspicious of anything coming out of EDTX by default.

    • TWeaK
      link
      fedilink
      21 year ago

      No offense taken. While I get what you mean about the language, and while I am a technical person I didn’t digest the full detail of what the patent describes, I do still think there is at the very least a hint of a solid invention in this patent. As I’ve said elsewhere, the key part that makes this novel is the synchronisation of video streams - you don’t just send your video to the TV, you don’t just tell the server to start playing on the TV, the server synchonises a stream between your device and the TV. In particular, this doesn’t just cover basic chromecasting, but the ability to synchronise and stream between a range of client devices and in a range of different topologies, particularly where one device might control the stream for others.

      I agree with your statement about EDTX and would inherently be suspicious, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. In the absence of some identical technology that predates this patent, I feel like their ruling is correct in this instance.

      However this is a weird patent in that it covers such a wide variety of things. It may well be that some are valid, while others aren’t, yet the nature of the patent is that all are protected as a group.