At 10:10 AM 10/06/99 -0700, Adam Wozniak wrote:
>Generally, the Abstract is not as important as the individual claims
>in the patent. the claims are what will be fought over in court.
>
>Generally, the way to defeat the claim is to show either that you did
>it in a manner not mentioned in the claim, or that there is prior art.
>
>--adam
What Adam said. Have a read through the full patent text, available at
http://www.uspto.gov/ to get a better idea of what the patents are actually
about. Often, the abstract of a patent has very little to do with what's
actually being claimed; it's just a broad description of the patent's
topic, or probable application. AFAIK, it has no actual legal influence on
the patent, beyond how readily it might turn up in a keyword search.
Here's my own preliminary look over these patents and their independent claims.
Disclaimer: I'm not qualified to comment on the legal interpretation of
patents, only technical details. However, I am making these comments and
observations for the purposes of discussion only; they in no way constitute
a complete and thorough technical analysis.
(Wow! That's the first time I've ever explicitly included a disclaimer
because of what I do for a living. There's a first time for everything.)
Patent 5,305,244:
Claim 1: "storage means mounted in the housing ... including an electronic
technical manual and a preprogrammed vocabularly [sic] model of a plurality
of words and phrases;"
Layman's terms: To show infringment, the infringing product(s) needs to
have "an electronic technical manual" and "a preprogrammed vocabulary". To
defend against it, you want to find some device(s) and/or literature which
satisfies all aspects of the claim (including an electronic technical
manual in the storage) existing before the date of priority of the patent -
preferably a good year before April 6, 1992.
Claim 9: "said recognizing including ... a preprogrammed vocabularly [sic]
... to recognize the command;"
Layman's terms: the vocabulary has to be pre-programmed; adaptive
recognition algorithms could pose problems, depending on the interpretation
of the pre-programmed and ("the") single-command recognition elements. Is
a statistically correlated/adapted vocabulary "preprogrammed"?
"... retrieving the requested information from an electronic technical
manual ..."
Layman's terms: If there isn't an electronic technical manual, or the
steps in this method aren't followed (i.e. an extra step is included,
breaking the flow of the method) , you may have problems showing infringment.
Patent 5,844,824:
Claim 1: "... means for storing previously entered information ...", "...
processor means including means for recognizing a command ..."
Layman's terms: You don't have to have an electronic technical manual or a
preprogrammed vocabulary, only stored information and a way to recognize
commands.
"wherein said hands-free activating means is selected from the group
consisting of audio activation means, eye-tracking activation means,
electroencephalography activation means and mixtures thereof"
Layman's terms: The hands-free method needs to be one of, or a combination
of elements of the group listed, in order to infringe upon this claim. If
you use your toes, you're ok. If you use a myoelectric method (signals
generated by muscle activity), your probably ok - I'm not sure if
myoelectric methods can be considered a subset of EEG methods though.
Claim 16: "A method for hands-free retrieval and display of information ..."
Layman's terms: If it's mobile and doesn't require any hands-on I/O steps
in order to retrieve and interact with data through or stored in the
device, you'd better watch out. i.e. If you have to push a button to talk,
it's not hands-free.
"...wherein said hands-free activating means is selected from the group..."
Layman's terms: As before, if your wearable is covered by this patent in
every way EXCEPT the use a hands-free method not included the group listed,
the point of your invention would be the use of this unlisted, hence novel,
hands-free I/O method.
...and that's all the hot water I'm willing to get myself into.
Deep Thought: If a person has a prosthetic arm/hand and types on a
keyboard, is that considered hands-free.?.
Andrew.
Andrew Plumb
mailto:
http://www.plumb.org/
http://wwp.mirabilis.com/13667980
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