The rest invalidated against Apple, through "alternative claim construction". That is, Apple's reading of the patent and its specific claims, showed it was narrower in scope than their particular usage.

None of this seems really surprising, and whilst it does open the door for Apple, it probably doesn't much open the door for other implementations to flourish - not without a lawyer guiding your particular tech choices.

How could an invention from 1972, which I assume was publically disclosed around that time, be patented in 2004?

Were the details kept secret for 32 years?

Let's change the name of America to the United States of America and move it from the front of drop down lists to the end.

Many years ago an Australian show famous for comedic Vox Pop street interviews had a hilarious run on "Asking Americans to name a country that started with the letter U".

Nobody in their right mind calls any of them by their full names. The rules are more-or-less consistent, it's just pedantry to complain about "America."

Elsewhere, others living on orbiting aggregates with surface soil like to occassionally disambiguate.

Naturally this seems insane to the exceptionalist denizens of Dirt.

Mexico alone is clear, a Mexican is a citizen of the UMS. The UK is equally clear.

Outside of the United States, particlularly with other American, North, South, or Central ESL speakers, it's not so clear.

This is why the practice arose many years past, why the BBC once had clear style guides on not using "American(s)" in any articles until after the full name United States of America had been used to establish context for which Americans wre intended.

> it's just pedantry to complain about "America."

Being clear isn't a complaint. It's taken as such by the small minded with a horizon limited by a halo about their head.

I don't think I have EVER seen "American" used to refer to "North and South America" outside of geography. That goes for when I'm outside the US, too. It's certainly not what reasonable people would assume you're talking about.

This discussion is really unproductive, so I guess we'll just have to disagree.

I'll refrain from reproducing the OED 2nd Edition entry for American unless you really want it, there are three uses as a adjective, five as a noun, the Adjective Use 2, variation c is "United States specific", ( 1.a is "Belonging to the continent of America. Also, of or pertaining to its inhabitants." )

So, you know, a few hundred years of printed use, with citations, says that others have seen it used more widely than yourself.

To be fair, that's all an aside to me .. what has caught my eye in the past few months is a few commenters on HN getting quite upset at "USAian, USofAian, etc" variations appearing here. Clearly this is new to some, others have seen such contractions about forums for four decades.

It follows from pre 2000 (ish) BBC and other style guides that eschew using "Americans" to refer to US citizens until after the context has been established, leading to older BBC articles and broadcasts opening stories with "In the United States today .... Americans reported ...".

From that, in (say) forums discussing i18n and|or l10n (the usual contractions for Internationalization and Localization) with Koreans, South Americans, various Commonwealth types etc. USian became a short fast way to specify which group of North Americans reference might be made to.

This seems straightforward, reasonable, non evangelical, and something a majority immediately "got" w/out batting an eye .. certainly causing less fuss than using "i18n" and other contractions.

I have to agree with you that the meaning of "Usian" is obvious from context in almost every case and it is a really annoying form of pettiness that makes a song and dance about it in protest every time it appears.

To change it now (why? to avoid hurting the feelings of people, most of whom do not even speak or read English?) would be harmful. "Harmful" is a strong word, so I will explain.

I don't hate Russia, but if I did, I would like it if the Russian people somehow stopped being able to continue to use the main word they've been using to refer to themselves for centuries. It would make it slightly harder for Russians to have conversations about themselves as a social and political entity and to understand old books about their ancestors.

Web sites influence human behavior by making some operations slightly more difficult than others. E.g., the "Accept all cookies" button is a prominent color whereas the "Reject all cookies" link is less so. The point is that a "trivial inconvenience" that is encountered often (i.e., whenever anyone tries to start a conversation about Americans) might have a significant effect over future decades in making Americans feels less united with their countrymen and discouraging discussion of American identity (because for example "USian" is more awkward to use in a spoken conversation than "American" is).

Sure, US citizens are, after all, a subset of North Americans and are Americans just as are South and Central Americans.

English speakers in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have indeed written many texts and articles in which they discuss the United States of America, events in the USofA, and then move to talk about Americans .. having established the context of which Americans they refer to.

This was explicit in BBC guidelines and UK newspapers of note until perhaps the 1990s.

> I don't hate Russia, but if I did, I would like it if the Russian people somehow felt unable to continue to use the main word they've been using to refer to themselves for centuries.

It's not clear how this comes into play here. If Russian speaking ethnically Russian non citizens of modern Russia refer to themselves as Russian after their family ties to the former Russian Empire then surely anyone in the Americas can equally be referred to as an American.

> "USian" is more awkward to use in a spoken conversation than "American" is).

I've not heard it used in spoken conversation. In text forums where I've seen it used since the 1980s it's shorthand to contract first saying "United States of America" and then referencing US citizens as Americans.

It's been in low level general use on forums and IRC by non US english and ESL speakers since pre-WWW Usenet in my experience.

What has changed is I've recently seen it and close variations crop up here on HN, a primarily US forum, more and more in the past few months.

That'd dovetail in with your observation, but it's not a new coinage nor is it exclusive to disgruntled US residents by any means.

I've never heard of USAnian before, but that doesn't mean it isn't used by some people, just not the ones I interact with.

Before USian, I'd come across Merkin, but usually British writers using it in a mildly derogative sense because of the word's other meaning.

It's not.

Anyone can put anything in Urban Dictionary, c'mon. Nobody said no one has uttered the term before.

If something is "often used", it winds up in dictionaries, with a lag of only a few years.

For oxygen sensing there are numerous readily available inexpensive stand-alone sensors available at any drug store or online. They are non-invasive and painless. Yes, a continuously wearable sensor would be better for some people but most people don't need that. Accordingly it is something that while nice wouldn't really sell a lot of watches, and so something that might not be worth licensing if it is under patent.

Glucose sensing on the other hand is a literal pain to test and has ongoing costs due to consumables used for the testing. Non-invasive painless glucose sensing on a watch is a feature that would sell a lot of watches. I think demand would be high enough, even if they have to raise prices, that it would easily be worth it.

- skin conductivity changes over time

- the ways in which skin tone changes signal absorption (which itself changes over time)

- the ways in which different levels of fitness affect blood flow, material density etc.

You also can't use it in a hospital setting, due to how your skin and bloodflow changes during serious conditions like sepsis (though I'm guessing they're not thinking about that market).

Really smart people have been trying to use Raman spectroscopy to solve this problem for decades at this point (early patents go to early 2000s). Apple is an extremely strong hardware vendor, and I wish them luck, but I would not hold my breath for this. Plus, I'm guessing they will not open the signal up for looping, which would really leave the T*DM community out to dry.

It would be super helpful to know (relative to other foods) how my body reacts to claimed low-carb foods. Is there a large spike (don't need to know the number) or is it a much more flat curve? How long in general does it take for the line to return to pre-meal levels? What does that trend look like over many months? Heck, I could even run a rudimentary and simple test to do comparative insulin response to a known amount of carbs to see if my insulin response is improving over time (using the period of the curve). I would love to get an alert that hey, we think your glucose level shot up a lot (don't care how much) so that I can remediate it through exercise then and there and avoid that food or timing going forward.

Really hoping the people in Medtech don't make perfect the enemy of good in this case. Although maybe what you listed would still be blockers for even getting general glucose curves. I've been planning on getting a CGM for at least a few months to achieve all of this, but it would be great to just have it in a watch or other simple wearable.

The issue with spectroscopic approaches is the amount of noise can be really hard to disentangle, to the point that you might get really unreliable trend information, where it might even be dangerous if you're making dosing decisions off it. And even if you aren't, getting incorrect trend information doesn't really help you any more than just not knowing it.

Unfortunately T1 diabetics and insulin dependant T2 diabetics will get killed by a machine that tosses out numbers that can be considerably off to the point no manufacturer is going to make the risky product.

If they can it'll be huge. Maybe even Ozempic-huge. There's a theory of weight loss that you can objectively manage your weight by never allowing your blood sugar to go over a certain level.

That doesn't work, even if it were true. You can also manage your weight by never allowing the weight on the scale to go over a certain level.

And no -- your weight on the scale varies drastically with water levels and food in the gut. By up to five pounds. It is useless for figuring out if you can eat another bite of rice.

While glucose levels are literally minute-by-minute. They're fine-grained enough to actually tell you when to eat more and when to not.

Losing weight is simple in theory, you can just eat less. In practice, eating less is very hard for some people. Having real time glucose information isn't going to help those people.

Losing weight is hard because it can be incredibly difficult to "just eat less" by the right amount.

If you "eat less" too little, you won't lose weight. While if you "eat less" too much, your health suffers and willpower becomes too difficult.

And counting calories doesn't work well if your calorie needs vary per-day, which nearly everyone's does -- how much did you walk, what temperature were the rooms you were in, etc.

The idea is that real time glucose information will allow you to "eat just right" -- never eating so little that willpower becomes an issue, but never so much that you gain weight (or fail to lose weight).

You shouldn't be so dismissive of the idea.

We're not talking about people with underlying health conditions. Exceptions don't invalidate a general principle.

> You’re suggesting 20 calories can make you obese because it raises blood glucose lol!

Nothing "lol" about it. An extra 20 calories, 20 times a day, every day for months and years, above your caloric needs, is yes quite likely to make you obese. How else do you think most people get obese?

> fat... will not spike your blood glucose until 5-12 hours later

And you can become aware of those patterns. You will know, for example, not to eat anything else during that window. Or learn to eat fat in gradual amounts, rather than large amounts in a single sitting.

> Blood glucose is VERY important but not predictive of weight.

You seem quite confident about that. You're also quite possibly wrong. The underlying logic is pretty sound: we gain weight when our blood sugar goes up and therefore our insulin goes up to remove the sugar from the bloodstream and, eventually, store it as fat.

I like this post because it assumes that humans don’t use sugar for energy. It is all stored as fat because the human body is a closed system that does not burn calories.

Also I like “I see you said 20, obviously you mean 20 times that”

I’d be hard-pressed to believe that someone trying the newest Dexcom G7 CGM would find it more discomforting than a mosquito bite. And for that literal pain you get 10 days of constant readings on your phone.

> I think demand would be high enough, even if they have to raise prices, that it would easily be worth it.

This is probably correct but I don’t think many non-diabetic people would see an actual benefit from CGM data. It’s the kind of thing people love to think is useful but in reality it’ll be just one more thing to ignore.

Right now, I’m on glipizide which manages (along with a low-carb diet) the situation, but I need the GCM so I know when this “honeymoon” period (before I start needing insulin) starts to end.

Unfortunately I have an extreme needle phobia too. My insurance doesn’t cover the G7, just the G6, so I don’t know if it’s different, but if I try to apply the G6, my heart rate will massively speed up, I will start to hyperventilate, and typically pass out when I click the button on the applicator. I’m out for only a few minutes, but it’s not a pleasant experience… I have to make sure I’m lying on a bed to do it now, after learning the hard way that it’s possible to fall when just sitting down, and head wounds don’t stop bleeding when you’re unconscious.

I would dearly love the ability to measure glucose non-invasively. It’s actually nowhere near as bad for me if I don’t have to click it myself, but my wife wouldn’t understand what to do, and my son is too young for me to feel comfortable asking. Theres no-one else around to help, so sometimes I make a dr appt, for a 10-second “click”. Most of the time I just put up with it. The hope is that the phobia starts to diminish, but so far it hasn’t, and yes I’ve tried psychologists.

Every 10 days, and [sigh] as I write, I recall that today is the day. Again.

But obviously they all have a needle because they need to get something under your skin. Which is I guess what triggers you.

So G6 it is. And yeah, the difference between the non-invasive and invasive is what causes the problem. It's weird, I don't have any other phobias, but I found out about this one when we all stabbed our fingers to test our blood-groups in school. Fell off the stool in the lab, 14 stitches in my scalp. Not the last time, either.

Isn't that the key point and means Dexcom/Libre would cost you (or your insurance company) several thousands of dollars/pounds/euros/etc every single year. For many people they already have an iphone and just need an Apple watch which could last for several years.

Yes, obviously if Apple could figure out how to get accurate BG numbers on an iPhone it would be better than the currently available CGMs.

Not diabetic, but I've tried a set of two of these out of curiosity. The insertion pain is nothing, but having something bonded to your skin with adhesive constantly is kind of a pain.

I also got some irritation at the insertion sites around the 1-week mark, though that might have been because I don't have much fat on that area of my arm.

My point is that CGM data is very very very unlikely to change behavior in the overwhelming majority of people.

I would have probably quit drinking alcohol a lot earlier if I had seen the hell it plays with sugars in your blood iirc.

Sometimes a notification that you did something unhealthy might be enough? Like my watch buzzes if it detects less than X steps in the last hour, tells me to get up. The app tells me I get to sleep too late most days.

If it told me that food I just ate is something I'll have to be careful with...

The CGM that wins is the one that doesnt stop working when batteries die. Or piercing the skin.

Which is the opposite of what's needed to understand whether scattered short term variations are breathing stops to worry about.

> regularity

Their variation feature does mark moments of (selectable low/med/high) variance, without the medically diagnostic information that seems to get patent claimants going.

One would then need to get a pre-ban Apple Watch (as it's a software toggle and the ban was not retroactive watches registered before that date continue to support the feature) or other device to monitor and record the data one's doctor needs.

It tracks movement and breathing during sleep. I think it now tracks snoring too, wakeups, rem/deep sleep times, and steps, heart rate, and stress levels.

The app is called zepp and I don't know if any of this is exportable but I only care about a cheap watch that has heartrate on it.

Apple Watches purchased and activated in USA after the patent lawsuit cut off date won't have the feature enabled, even if you travel or move.

It wasn't really designed for people patenting vague concepts, math or ideas.

If you build a better mousetrap, a patent is pretty good. If you have a vague idea you might show ads in elevators, you should A: just be shot, and B: not get a patent

(Well after I posted this comment you can't anymore)

Today, they are simply a giant anchor on the speed of innovation.

The software world has flourished with effectively very little patent protection and very lax IP enforcement.

And in the hardware world China quickly commoditizes and copies everything, regardless of US patents anyways.

The only real moats in modern capitalism come from talent, marketing, distribution, and regulation.

Patents are now just a weaponized form of regulation useful for kneecapping domestic competitors. They hurt the local economy more than helping it.

If copyright worked like patents, Disney wouldn't have a monopoly on the Star Wars franchise

Patents tend to be super-broad, so instead they'd have a monopoly on all space-related fictional media.

Even within patents, you're not supposed to be able to patent a "fact", which is why most math is non-patentable, and it gets into kind of weird territory when you get into stuff like algorithms: is an algorithm part of mathematics and therefore a fact and therefore non-patentable? or is it closer to an invention and engineering, and therefore should be patented? Or is coding "creative" enough to where we should actually be copyrighting algorithms?

I have no idea the answer to that question, or where the line should be drawn (though I gravitate towards the "math" side).

I don't know where I'm going with this; intellectual property law is weird.

I kind of think that patents should not exist. I'm not a scholar in the area, but I am not aware of good evidence that, without patents, we would be bereft of the many inventions of human history and especially the last 200 years. And actually, the open source movement demonstrates that there is a very strong human impulse that will create and invent things without material recompense. My reading of patent history is that people who were inventing things anyway wanted a way to profit from it, not that there was a lack of invention and patents were arrived at as a solution to that problem.

Perhaps someone could object that companies are responsible for a lot of invention and they need to be incentivized in a way that individual inventors do not. But I'm not convinced that making a better mousetrap isn't enough of an incentive. After all, companies spend an incredible amount of money on sales and marketing (usually a larger line item than R&D on a company's income statement) and neither of those gives you a legally enforced competitive advantage.

I think the best argument for patents is to encourage drug discovery, since the costs are enormous due to the testing requirements. But if the main cost is in testing, then perhaps the solution is to require that copycat medications also go through the testing process, at least for some period of time. Or just have patents for drugs but not for other things. Or just have the government engage in drug discovery and validation directly (normally I'm against the government doing stuff, but I'm not convinced that the lack of a profit motive would be worse than the presence of a profit motive when it comes to drug discover).

The main point being, if you’re still making money hand over fist from your book you wrote, or film you made, you can keep the copyright. But at some point, you have to prove it has value by paying for it, with a fast growing price each year after, and still a finite time where the copyright goes away entirely. This prevents dead copyrights where you can’t even find the copyright holder, because they died 50 years ago, and the work is obscure, but you want to license it. But if you create some original song or story or whatever, it’s totally fair that only you get to make money from that for a very long while.

> But if you create some original song or story or whatever, it’s totally fair that only you get to make money from that for a very long while.

Why is this “very long while” based on how much money you are making, and why would it be different from creating anything else?

The point of taxpayer funded legal and police protection for owners of patents and copyright terms is to incentivize creating something, not to maximize rent seeking abilities for the creator.

> if your work stops producing value, squatting on it IS rent seeking

“Producing value” is far too nebulous of a parameter to legally enforce. Again, the point of a copyright and patent is to incentivize creation. At a certain point, it moves from incentivizing to rewarding those that sit on previous accomplishments.

That is why old movies, music, and games are locked away or only accessible via pirating, why TV shows from the 1990s and 2000s have different soundtracks if streamed legally today, and why patent trolls exist.

That's enough time to realistically make money off your creation, but not so much time that your great grandkids are also making money off of it.

The fact that a lot of things are invented and patented in the US shows that the comparatively shorter timespan doesn't appear to be discouraging innovation and creativity, and I think that would hold with copyright as well.

It is a mechanism of slavers and connected lineages, and completely puts of a boot on the neck of unconnected innovators, which are abundant in today's age.

They must be abolished.

But filing fees, etc (ie those things set by the USPTO) are really quite reasonable imo. Strictly speaking you don’t have to use a lawyer to file (I know that can be a minor concession in the landscape of practical success). Maybe you can clarify what you mean by “connected” vs “unconnected”in this case? I’m missing how patent law directly related to connections/lineage beyond what sister comments have said re: ability to litigate or be patent trolls. But I think that’s the point of the sister comment on it (at least ideally) cutting both ways.

Explicit are things like racism, lineage requirements (like Ivy leagues asking if you have family that attended), etc.

Implicit are things like growing up in poverty and not having the knowledge, access to mentors, or access to the money to secure ideas.

The rich and connected have access to everything to buy and secure ideas. They can even buy people and take their ideas for themselves without proper compensation, because generally, creators are not negotiators.

It is a rigged system that empowers slavers.

People in poverty, for example, expend significantly more energy to develop a creative mindset, and have little to no energy for negotiation and navigating legal frameworks. So because of this, they relinquish that power to abusers who benefit for their relative disability.

I could write a book about this but if you think it through, it is clear. You could also paste my comment into AI and have a discussion about it.

The fairy tale of the solo patent holder fighting off giant mega corporations is worthy of a Hallmark movie and just as realistic.

I think that is a major problem with patents - all inventions are treated the same. However there is a big difference between something reasonably new that took a decade of r&d work to get right and a tiny change to an existing invention which took a day and is an obvious logical progession from what came before which everyone would have came up with.

The plaintiff had some pretty good evidence that it was in fact not obvious:

• The defendant was one of the largest companies in the field with a very accomplished and impressive R&D department. The plaintiff introduced documents they got from the defendant during discovery where the CEO had called solving the specific problem that the patent solved to be vital to the future existence of their company and made solving it a top priority. Yet they failed to make any progress on it.

• Two of the other largest companies in the field, also with impressive R&D departments, had also been working on this and failed to come up with anything.

The jury found that the patent was obvious.

What I think happened is that both plaintiff and defendant had presentations that explained to the jury what the patent did. Both presentations did a great job of finding a problem from everyday life that was kind of analogous to the problem the patent involved, and translating the patent's solution to that everyday life problem. The presentations made it easy to understand the gist of what the patent did.

There's a natural tendency to mistake easy to understand for obviousness, and I think that by explaining the invention in a way that made it easy to understand it also made the jury think it was obvious.

But if you don't explain the invention in a way that the jury can understand how are they supposed to be able to make decisions?

This reminds me of college. Many a time I'd read some theorem named after a mathematician and think "how the heck does this obvious theorem get named after someone?". The answer is that it wasn't at all obvious when that mathematician proved it 400 years ago. I'm seeing it after 400 years of people figuring out how to present the subject in a way that makes that theorem obvious.

That reminds me of a classic math joke: A professor says "It is obvious that" and writes an equation. Then he pauses, and says "...wait, is that obvious?". He goes to another board and starts deriving the equation, not saying anything while doing this. After 20 minutes he had gotten it, says "I was right! It is obvious!" and goes back and resumes his lecture.

Specifically, it only counts if it was obvious before the patent filing to a person of ordinary skill. It's actually really hard for a patent claim to be rejected for obviousness. A poking stick for pressing buttons on a TV without getting up counts as a non-obvious invention.

In many cases there are patent pools you can license that cover large areas of the standards, without needing to negotiate each one individually.

Many very fundamental parts of 4G/ 5G are patented and you'll not be able to get your device to work on the network without those patents, so Apple will have licensed those patents under FRAND for their new C1 modem.

Or are there still quite a few challenges ahead and this is merely one roadblock removed.

The Wright brothers patented a method of flight control and then went on a litigation spree. The result was that the US was unable to build airplanes. This became a problem when the US entered World War One and the US military had to buy planes from France.

This situation was so bad that the Federal government stepped in to force the major players to create a patent pool, a situation that lasted until 1977.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war

The strangest thing was keeping my blood sugar spikes really low but still gaining weight. I didn’t think my body could really store fat without a spike but apparently it can.

But there is no universe it will be accurate enough to make insulin dosing decisions. Insulin dependent diabetics will require CGMs or finger pricks for another couple decades.

there's sort of a usefulness threshold, and then there's a "can calculate insulin" threshold.

I think a LOT of people could benefit from plain high, medium, low with the understanding that you wouldn't make insulin decision based on it.

This will be a revolution in personalized medicine.

Ketones next please.

There have been blood glucose sensors using needles for a long time, and many sports banned them because they are a huge advantage - but they didn't want to de-factor force every athlete to constantly prick an IV under their skin and then run around with it for hours.

Once those come in smart watches, every semi-advanced runner (and those who'd like to feel like one) will need one.

> every semi-advanced runner (and those who'd like to feel like one) will need one

This, however, is the truth. Every semi-advanced runner (and wannabe) knows that they need to run more, run slower on most of their runs, run fast occasionally, and eat well in order to improve their performance. But they’ll buy literally anything that might offer them an “edge” instead.

It's not that small. Garmin made billions in revenue here, expanding it on the process. Most of their customers don't really need blood oxygen either, but they all have it anyway.

Patents were created not to protect the little man, but with the intent of creating a vibrant commons of knowledge.

Not that the original intent matters at all at this point, we're so far from that that it's only really of interest to historians.

Abolish the patent system and let the free market work again. This is just theft by the elite.

A couple of 30 second Google searches would show how their invention pre-dated the prevalence of big companies by centuries.

All FTF changes is what happens when multiple inventors invent the same thing.

Under first-to-invent (FTI) your priority date was the date you conceived the invention if you then worked diligently toward reducing the idea to practice up until you filed your patent application. If you stopped working diligently on reducing the idea to practice and then resumed it, the date you resumed became your new priority date.

What counts as a break in working toward reduction to practice sufficient to reset your priority date? How much documentation do you need to prove you were working continuously on it from your claimed priority date?

Figuring all that out can be expensive and time consuming and often gives results that seem wrong. It's almost random whether the priority date by this method actually matches who seems to morally most deserve the patent.

FTF gives priority to whoever files first. It doesn't produce any worse outcome than FTI and saves a lot of time and money for both the patent office and applicants.