What I am not questioning is it's considered valid under law according to this case in the United States and abstracting yourself from the view of hating or not hating patent law - that's the test here.
It is irrelevant what a group of people can come up with 1 sec past the filing date, even on the other side of the world - the test is, given the available knowledge at the time of filing the patent and relevant to a person who is skilled in the art of the current available knowledge - would they be able to replicate the features detailed in the invention specification (essentially off my head).
In this case - it was ruled no. Despite all the prior art presented to the jury, despite all the previous evidence and so on and so on - it was considered wilfull infringement and a lot of the evidence presented showed that Samsung basically said "this feature of Apples is cool! lets copy that" ... which is pretty striking to lay-persons not skilled in law as jurors and tends to heavily weigh in their mind. And again, patent law considers - in some detail - that blends can in fact be new inventions. Patent law in the United States is very different to the rest of the world however and that has to be considered in this - the tests in Europe are much stricter and that's why many software patents aren't available there.
It is irrelevant what a group of people can come up with 1 sec past the filing date, even on the other side of the world - the test is, given the available knowledge at the time of filing the patent and relevant to a person who is skilled in the art of the current available knowledge - would they be able to replicate the features detailed in the invention specification (essentially off my head).
In this case - it was ruled no. Despite all the prior art presented to the jury, despite all the previous evidence and so on and so on - it was considered wilfull infringement and a lot of the evidence presented showed that Samsung basically said "this feature of Apples is cool! lets copy that" ... which is pretty striking to lay-persons not skilled in law as jurors and tends to heavily weigh in their mind. And again, patent law considers - in some detail - that blends can in fact be new inventions. Patent law in the United States is very different to the rest of the world however and that has to be considered in this - the tests in Europe are much stricter and that's why many software patents aren't available there.
For context - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Euro...