Patent troll is killing networked sex toy industry

boing
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I had such thoughts in mid-2000s. Of course thoughts are cheap, actual project rollout counts.

I don’t think it is about them not wanting people to have this tech. This is more a standard protection-racket class patent trolley shakedown.

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"Actual speed", I about shit my pants laughing at that!

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It’d be better in the long run to just invalidate and throw out that patent, because it’s an illegal patent that doesn’t actually cover patentable stuff. May as well be a patent on a maple leaf, or a big rock you found.

Sometimes I wish we could just hire a reasonable number of people to work at the USPTO, train them properly, and reset all current patents. Any parties interested in maintaining their patent can resubmit, and if it turns out they’re attempting to patent bullshit, fine them a nominal fee in addition to the submission fee, so it becomes less profitable to patent things like scanning to email or podcasting.

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I would have just embedded it into a timed text stream, eg an extra subtitles track. But then again, I’m not particularly good at sex, so I didn’t think of bandwidth restrictions.

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Advantage of the approach: lower bandwidth. Disadvantage: you have to use special software on the device instead of just piping the “sound” to a USB “sound card”.

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Claim 1 would appear to me to cover a button, light and buzzer. That is, a user interface, a display device and a stimulation device. That does seem a touch over-reaching.

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It could also cover setting vibration ringing, placing one’s cellphone youknowwhere, then calling it.

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I was just about to say that the FuckU-FuckMe was prior art, but I just learned it was a hoax. Wow. I’m 20 years late to the joke. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/fuck-u-fuck-me/images/3/

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The patent itself seems incredibly broad, with the ISAPI example merely being one possible implementation. They also seem to be suing various companies that aren’t even working with products that are controlled over the internet, so…

Given how absurdly broad the patent is, I’d think that the prior art wouldn’t be hard to find, though.

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Butt…Butt…!!!

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Do we actually want or need a networked sex toy industry?

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Any reasons why we should not have that?

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Do we actually want or need a patent troll industry? I’d say it’s objectively no on both counts. At least as a nation. I’m sure the miserable shitheel patent trolls are happy with existing. But so are leeches, bot flies, and guinea worms.

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Because ISIS!

(I mean, if I were a cyberterrorist with a particularly nasty streak…)

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