Stupid Patent of the Month: Trading By Tweet

Furnished content.


We've written many times about how the patent system is a poor fit for software. Innovation in the U.S. software industry happens despite, not because of, the thousands of software patents that are granted each year.But software is not the only industry where patents make very little sense. In the 1990s, the Federal Circuit opened the door to patents on methods of doing business. While the Supreme Court tried to undo some of that damage, financial institutions are still hit with patent lawsuits. Many of these suits come from trolls that don't produce anything. And yet, just as in the tech sector, there are some financial companies that keep heading back to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office seeking a 20-year monopoly on some tactic or another.This month, we're highlighting U.S. Patent Number 10,147,140, which was recently granted to BNY Mellon Bank. The first claim of the '140 patent uses a lot of financial jargon to describe an extremely simple process: checking social media for a particular event or statement, then making a trade based on that "investment triggering content." One example of that: making a trade because someone put a hashtag in a tweet.Even if this was a new product idea or investment strategy, it is not a new invention. The trend of stock market trading has been clear now for decades: automated trading has become faster and more computerized each year. BNY Mellon Bank did not invent computerized trading, social media, or anything else remotely technical. Rather, its patent proposes the idea of trading based on a social media event.In the patent prosecution documents, the patent examiner even starts out by admitting that "the concept described in claim 1 is not meaningfully different than the economic concept found by the courts to be an abstract idea." Appropriately, the examiner cited Alice v. CLS Bank, which forbids "do it on a computer"-type patents. Similarly, Alice should clearly forbid patents on very old practices, like trading stocks, and simply adding in "social media monitoring.But then the examiner goes on to agree with the applicant's specious argument that just because the claim has additional limitationssuch as "using a processor to withdraw[] funds from a customer financial account and then purchase shares," and an interface that shows social media informationit becomes eligible. "When viewed as an ordered combination, the additional limitations amount to significantly more than the abstract idea," the examiner concludes, "[t]he idea is patent eligible."Adding generic computer processes shouldn't have made this patent eligible. So how does it happen? One big problem is that incentives in the patent application process line up to favor the granting of patents. Patent examiners are graded through a "count" system that gives them progressively less credit as persistent applicants file new amendments, arguments, requests for continued examination, and continuation applications. This system makes it impossible for the Patent Office to ever finally reject an application. There is only one way for the Patent Office to get rid of a persistent applicant: give them a patent.In this case, the BNY Mellon's lawyers essentially just pounded their fists on the table. They offered nothing more than the bare insistence that the patent included an "ordered combination," and that should negate the Alice rules. "There was no showing that the combination as a whole failed to provide an inventive concept," wrote the applicants. The examiner simply gave up and issued a patent that is plainly ineligible under Alice and many other cases.We've written before that the Patent Office needs to do a better job applying Alice. Unfortunately, the new Director appears to want the opposite. Other lobbyists are pushing for legislation to undo Alice entirely. If they get their way, we can expect another flood of silly patents on business methods and software.Reposted from the EFF's Stupid Patent of the Month series.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story


Read more here

0 comments, click here to add the first

County Agrees To Pay $390,000 To Students Arrested By A Sheriff 'Just To Prove A Point'

Furnished content.

Back in September, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unshockingly decided that it's illegal to arrest schoolchildren just to "prove a point." The Fourth Amendment demands probable cause for an arrest, even an arrest of students who have (slightly) diminished Constitutional rights.

This was Deputy Luis Ortiz's solution to a problem he shouldn't even have been attempting to solve. Ortiz decided the students he was speaking to about alleged bullying weren't taking him seriously enough, so he tossed a few in squad cars and took them to the Sheriff's office. Nothing about this was legal, but the county decided to defend this all the way to the appellate level. The Ninth Circuit's assessment of Ortiz's actions was harsh but far more fair than Ortiz deserved.

Deputy Ortiz clearly stated that the justification for the arrests was not the commission of a crime, since he did not “care who is at fault,” nor the school’s special need to maintain campus safety, but rather his own desire to “prove a point” and “make” the students “mature a lot faster.” The arrest of a middle schooler, however, cannot be justified as a scare tactic, a lesson in maturity, or a chastisement for perceived disrespect.

[...]

Deputy Ortiz faced a room of seven seated, mostly quiet middle school girls, and only generalized allegations of fighting and conflict amongst them. Even accounting for what Deputy Ortiz perceived to be nonresponsiveness to his questioning, the full-scale arrests of all seven students, without further inquiry, was both excessively intrusive in light of the girls’ young ages and not reasonably related to the school’s expressed need.

It appears this loss has finally pushed the county to accept the inevitable outcome of Deputy Ortiz's unconstitutional behavior. The Daily Bulletin reports taxpayers will be paying the arrested students for Ortiz's illegal bullying.

San Bernardino County has agreed to pay nearly $400,000 to three former middle-schoolers to settle a lawsuit stemming from a 2013 arrest a federal court ruled unconstitutional.

In October 2013, a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy handcuffed, arrested and drove three seventh-grade girls from Etiwanda Intermediate School to the police station to “teach the girls a lesson.”

On Friday, Dec. 21, a lawyer for the girls announced the county has paid them $390,000 to settle their lawsuit.

This outcome was all but assured the moment Ortiz decided to start teaching students lessons by performing unconstitutional arrests. The county's decision to fight the district court's ruling doesn't reflect well on it or its legal representation. Somehow the county thought that if it just litigated hard enough, it would somehow talk a court into agreeing law enforcement can arrest people just to "teach them a lesson" -- even when those "someones" were teens who committed no crime and posed no safety threat to the school or the idiotic law enforcement officer it had hired.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story


Read more here

0 comments, click here to add the first