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August 2017
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Stupid Patent of the Month: HP Patents Reminder Messages

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On July 25, 2017, the Patent Office issued a patent to HP on reminder messages. Someone needs to remind the Patent Office to look at the real world before issuing patents.United States Patent No. 9,715,680 (the '680 patent) is titled "Reminder messages." While the patent application does suggest some minor tweaks to standard automated reminders, none of these supposed additions deserve patent protection.Claim 1 of the patent states (comments in brackets):

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium containing instructions, the instructions when executed by a processor causing the processor to [use a computer to]:receive at a first computer system, via a network, event data descriptive of an event to occur at an event time [get event and time information];receive via the network, reminder data descriptive of a reminder time to occur on or before the event time [get the reminder time];at a time after receipt of the event data, receive via the network article data descriptive of an article to be associated with the event, the article data created during an electronic scanning operation [receive some additional information (created by scanning) relating to the event]; andat the reminder time send via the network a reminder message describing the event and the article to a second computer system, for presentation at the second computer system [at the reminder time, send the reminder message].
Although this claim uses some obscure language (like "non-transitory computer-readable storage medium" and "article data"), it describes a quite mundane process. The "article data" is simply additional information associated with an event. For example, 'buy a cake' might be included with a birthday reminder. The patent also requires that this extra information be input via a "scanning operation" (e.g. scanning a QR code).
The '680 patent comes from an application filed in July 2012. It is supposed to represent a non-obvious advance on technology that existed before that date. Of course, reminder messages were standard many years before the application was filed. And just a few minutes of research reveals that QR codes were already used to encode information for reminder messages. For example, QRickit suggested using QR codes for calendar events and reminders (with the option of adding additional information beyond the event descriptor). This 2011 article suggests using QR codes to embed information such as "assignments for the week." The only even arguable difference from the prior art is that the patent's claims require the "article data" to be received after the event data. In our view, that is not a distinction that warrants the government-granted monopoly power inherent in a patent.The Patent Office reviewed HP's application for years without ever considering any real-world products. Indeed, the examiner considered only patents and patent applications. We have complained before that the Patent Office seems to operate in an alternative universe where only patents provide evidence of the state of the art in software. The fact that the Patent Office doesn't take developments in real software into account in its assessment of prior art speaks poorly for its ability to determine whether patent applications actually reflect new inventions.In addition to failing to consider real products, the Patent Office gives little weight to common sense and takes an extremely rigid approach to evaluating whether or not a patent application is obvious. This leads to patents on things like taking photos against a white background, filming a yoga class, voting for a favorite photo, and out-of-office email. Much of the responsibility for this mess rests with the Federal Circuit, which has failed to apply a Supreme Court case called KSR v. Teleflex that calls for a flexible, common sense approach to obviousness. Together with Public Knowledge, EFF recently filed an amicus brief [PDF] asking the Supreme Court to consider the obviousness standard in patent law and to reaffirm that examiners can reject common sense combinations of known elements.Even leaving obviousness aside, HP's patent application still should have been rejected under Alice v. CLS Bank. In Alice, the Supreme Court ruled that an abstract idea does not become eligible for a patent simply by being implemented on a generic computer. As with many software patents, the patent goes out of its way to explain that its method can be implemented on a generic computer, or, as the patent puts it "generally any computer." Despite this, the prosecution history [PDF] reveals that the examiner never even mentioned Alice, even in office actions written well after the Supreme Court's decision came down. We have written many times (e.g. 1, 2, 3, and 4) to protest that the Patent Office is not doing enough to diligently apply the Alice decision. The '680 patent provides yet another example of abstract software patents being issued despite the Supreme Court's ruling.In case you want to set a reminder, the '680 patent will expire on December 16, 2035.Republished from the EFF's Stupid Patent of the Month series.

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Twitter Suspends Popehat For Writing About Violent Threats He Received From Another Twitter User

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Twitter has gotten a lot of flack over the years for how it responds to threats and abuse online -- much of it deserved. The company insists that it's gotten much better about this, and now responds much more quickly to inappropriate threats or abuse online. But doing so is often difficult and bound to lead to some really bad decisions. Like one that just happened. Ken White's Popehat account has been temporarily suspended from Twitter. Why? Because he posted a threat he had received from someone else on Twitter to Twitter.If you're a regular Techdirt reader, I'm sure you're familiar with Ken "Popehat" White, the blogging lawyer who covers a lot of the same stuff we do, mainly in the free speech realm. Ken has also, a few times, represented us in response to silly legal threats we've received. If you're a Twitter user, you may also be aware that Ken is a prolific and masterful user of Twitter often commenting on the news of the day. He also uses Twitter to do some law 'splaining and to call out bullies and trolls. He's pretty good at it. One such recent bully was a Texas lawyer named Jason L. Van Dyke. We actually wrote about Jason a few years ago when he tried to sue the Tor Project, because some revenge porn site used Tor. We didn't hear much about him until a few months ago. It seems that, somehow, Van Dyke was offered a job as an assistant district attorney in Victoria County. For unclear reasons, that job offer was pulled. Van Dyke was not happy. He proceeds to sue the DA for pulling the job offer.In the midst of all this, another Twitter user, Asher Langton -- who has an uncanny ability to sniff out people online who are not exactly what they claim to be -- pointing out that it certainly looked like there were very strong similarities between Van Dyke and someone claiming to be a lawyer trolling for business on the white supremacist site Stormfront. There's a fair amount of back and forth between Langton and Van Dyke and then a direct threat from Van Dyke to knock out Langton's teeth. At one point there was this bizarre drama in which Van Dyke gave Langton 24 hours to promise to stop talking about him or promising to come to Langton and punch out his teeth.

24 hours passed and nothing happened.Anyway... around this point, Ken White steps in and writes up quite the post about Jason L. Van Dyke. It's a good, well researched, thorough and detailed post as you might expect. In response, Van Dyke trains his anger on Ken, and starts tweeting shit about Ken and making similar threats to those he made to Langton (though a bunch of those tweets now appear to have been deleted).
There were other tweets that certainly appeared to imply potential violence against Ken including a meme involving a bullet, that Van Dyke posted to Ken's Facebook thread about one of his posts:
Ken then posts a second story about being sent a truly pathetic "glitterbomb" by someone claiming to be a supporter of Van Dyke's... and then goes on to expose someone who commented about Van Dyke on the earlier post, making Van Dyke out to be some sort of bad ass (or, as Ken puts it "a badass [as] might be imagined by a lonely 14-year-old.") Ken tracks down some evidence suggesting that the comment came from Van Dyke himself or someone working with him (though, very likely Van Dyke himself).Following that post, Van Dyke sent Ken this email:
If you can't read that, it says:
White--You listen to me, and you listen good. This ends now and here is how it's going to work. I have deleted my Twitter account because, frankly, I have better things to do than deal with you and your followers. I am going to make you a one-time offer and you get to choose.
  1. I am willing to walk away. Right here. Right now. You remove the libelous blog posts about me and make whatever excuse you want. I really don't care what it is. You will never see or hear from me ever again. We both go about our lives.
  2. You can do what I think you are more than likely to do anyway and simple add this e-mail to your blog post. If you d that, I want to make it very clear what is going to happen. I have a picture of you. I am going to put it on my mirror at home, near my desk, and in my truck. My pure and absolute hatred for you will be unprecedented. My hatred for you will serve as a motivation for me to build an entirely new business and to earn enough money so that, one day, I will be able to make your life such an absolute living hell that I'll be able to hurt you without so much as laying a hand on you. I will make you so miserable and treat you with such extreme and completely unprecedented cruelly that you'll either kill yourself or move yourself and your family to the most remote part of the world you can afford to escape my wrath. The bottom line is that I will not forget you and that there will be retribution. It may take me a year. It may take me 20 years. I may get you on my first try. I may get you on my seventeenth try. But I will never stop.
You will take this offer today or the only thing you will have to know is that, sooner or later, I will come for you.Jason L. Van Dyke
Attorney & Counselor at Law
So, nice guy, right? Ken posted that email to his blog and to Twitter, noting: "I don't respond well to threats. It's kind of a thing. Sorry, Jason."
And... Twitter suspends Ken's Popehat account for 12 hours. Ken's. Not Jason's. Not the guy doing the threatening. The guy posting about being threatened. It's Twitter's "cool off" suspension, in which your account is still live, but you can't tweet, retweet or like other tweets for 12 hours.
Having seen stuff like this before, I'm pretty sure I know why Twitter did this, even if it's stupid. Twitter's terms of service and "rules" which are incorporated into the terms says that you cannot share private information. In the past I've seen similar suspensions when people post someone else's email that includes phone numbers/addresses and the like. Indeed in a post that Ken just put up on his own blog, Twitter confirms that it's the posting of someone else's info that got him into trouble, though Ken points out that Twitter itself says that it will take context into account. And if you're taking context into account, you have to wonder how it is that Ken gets suspended for highlighting the guy who threatened him, while the actual threatener remains free to post at will.I asked Ken for a comment on the situation, and he told me:
Twitter is perfectly in its rights to do this. Twitter is a private company with its own free speech and free association rights. I've got no right to post there if they don't want me to post there.But I think most reasonable people would see this as egregiously stupid, and a sign of a recurrent problem -- the systems that social media platforms put in place to deal with harassment are often dumb, and seem to catch people responding to threats and abuse as often as they catch the abuse itself.Meanwhile, I'm not deleting the tweet. I wrote about a lawyer and damn-near-active-prosecutor who threatened people who writing about him, and he threatened me. When I wrote more, he threatened more, including that freakish email. That's newsworthy, and I'm not taking it down.
Indeed. We've talked many times about the problems of demanding that platforms police behavior. It's one of those things that seems easy, until you realize just how tricky it is. A trust and safety team dropping in on Ken's conversations wouldn't have the relevant background and is likely to rush through and make a bad decision. So be careful what you wish for when you say platforms should be policing content. They're probably not up to the task.

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