An inter-partes review ( IPR2018-00044) at the U.S. Patent Office is not the most exciting part of my life as a software expert witness, but it more often leads to a clear resolution (timeline) than do the Federal District Court cases. The patent in question, 7,302,423, covers a way to browse the contents of a database. For curious readers: the decision.
Related:
P. 42 typo in blockquote of you? Missing no before knowledge of SQL?
Who would issue patent on simple development tasks? Several times I developed functionality similar to description for patent 7302423 – Search-on-the-fly with merge function in mid – 1990th working for a client property of the client and than for employer property of employer, and I think that similar functionality already existed before in other products. Looks like many corporations offer similar products, one of the non-mentioned is Red gate.
Is it worth applying for software patents? Much of recent shared source development is done without patents, including entire frameworks and methods od presentation . So if someone patented his prior art, pay off is unlikely. Isn’t it?
I recall long ago interview question, after I said that right now clustered keys on rdbms table can be only unique. The company actually was to about build intuitive dynamic database front–end similar to material in the patent. The question was “how it is possible to have more then one clustered key?” I answered “easiest way is have an object that manages serialization and deserialization CRUD, save two or more copies of the data using parallel network calls sing suitable hardware .” That’s something that I have used often in my development for speed of access optimization. Now I see it similar staff used in many virtualization scenarios. Was something like this patentable?