If I understand correctly this patent is only active in the USA. Anki is based on SuperMemo-2 and they freely admit it. SuperMemo (based in Poland) has pretty liberal licensing:
How much has Anki's handling of flashcards changed since it was first released? Anki was publicly released well before this patent's priority date, and so nothing Anki was doing then can infringe.
It's possible that newer feature of Anki infringe, and so worst case they might have to revert those, but the basic Anki functionality is safe.
What is the recourse here? Would it be reasonable to contact the person that approved the patent with information showing that plenty flashcard systems precede this patent? I imagine there is some more formal system.
If you want to make a flashcard program, pray to gods Google will take pity on you and not enforce their patent. Otherwise, you better had set aside a couple of million dollars for the patent fight with Google. I mean, the patent will eventually get invalidated, but not before a decade in courts and millions of dollars in costs.
EDIT: Ignore everything I said. I got confused. I apologize. I am not going to change the original comment so the context of the replies would be preserved.
It looks like it's a person (not a company) that owns the patent too, so unless this person is a m/billionaire a court case doesn't even sound that bad.
It's not a Google patent. The article link is just a link to patents.google.com, which is a Google search engine for patents not a list of patents owned by Google.
I’d love to see a charity formed for the sole purpose of challenging these patents in courts. Crowdfunding can go a long way, and strategic legal wins can go a long way in shaping precedence.
Many organizations dabble in these challenges, but it needs a singular purpose.
If a patent clerk is confused by the patent, then it should be rejected not granted.
The whole premise of the patent process it that you disclose your invention for the good of the population and in return you are granted a temporary monopoly over your invention.
I would never, ever, reference a software patent in order to implement a patented invention. They do not serve as any usable guide for the so called "invention." Therefore they are a perversion of the patent process and should not be granted.
The language used for describing patents is not quite English, in some ways it's a bit like a programming language, you can sort of create variables, arrays (the first X, the second X, ...), subroutine calls (even recursive calls provided they don't recurse infinitely, though that pushes the cost up) some words have different meanings ("or" for example is always exclusive or) etc etc
My friend was a patent clerk. She is pretty sharp. She explained that rules make it much more time-consuming to deny an application than to grant it or coach the applicant on changes they need to make in order to win a grant. Something about needing to explicitly refute each claim. Further, clerks are given quotas on how many patents they must review a week. It’s a pretty crushing load, so the system favors grants.
> Something about needing to explicitly refute each claim
Seems like a wholly reasonable rule, no? We don't want the government to arbitrary grant or deny something without applying the same rules to everyone?
> at a quick glance it doesn't appear that it claims a novel electronic flashcard method
I mean, there is no such thing. It isn't possible to create something like that. Computers only perform a specific set of actions, and it doesn't matter how you put them together to do the flashcard thing. Or anything. There's nothing novel to be found. It's just math.
We should not grant artificial exclusivity over categories of functionality that computers were designed to provide.
I'm with you on the sentiment. But comment on the rationale behind the sentiment..
> Computers only perform a specific set of actions, and it doesn't matter how you put them together..
More or less everything in this world is about understanding how 'elements' work and then how to put them together to invent a new thing.. Medicines (molecules), Design (lines and shapes), Art (colors and mediums), Yoga (Asanas), etc.
The nuance with software is that we made up the system in which all of these programs are put together.
Just like in math, we made up the constructs and rules that define what an algorithm or a theorem or a function can be. Because there is a human-defined limited scope of what even constitutes a valid construct (i.e. an "upper limit" of novelty - "this is everything mathematics can do"), anything that exists within this sandbox is therefore less novel. We establish the baseline novelty of the entirety of mathematics as "really powerful, and world changing - and too important to the common good to lock behind a patent." So if that is the upper limit, no individual piece of it can be more novel.
The patent office displays stunning clarity in correctly determining that therefore, any particular instance of maths cannot be patented.
Their failure to apply this same reasoning to software (which is, and always will be, reducible to math) baffles me.
And, don't read patent application publications and mistake them for patent publications. The USPTO labels the granted publication with a B after the number. In this case, the granted patent (https://patents.google.com/patent/US8595637B2/) has seen amendments to the claims during examination before grant.
At this point we should just disband the patent office. Does it even serve a purpose in modern times? China, where most of our goods come from has no respect for the American patent system.
Don't look at the title. At a glance, the claims looks like a very specific implementation of a flashcard application, which does not seem to be relevant to the current flashcard apps. Did I miss something?
The first three paragraphs of claim 1 describe every flashcard application ever made. As far as I can tell, the "novel" part of the invention being claimed is the fourth paragraph, namely the concept of displaying multiple cards on the screen at the same time.
IMO, that's still an extremely broad concept to be granted a patent on.
There seems to be a weird bug on the Google Patents site. I've noticed that the expiration date of a patent is always the day I visit the site, even for patents I know expired a while ago. This may be something like that.
Ah, thanks. As in Expired (date). Where date is every day from the day it expires until forever. Not Expired on date, but currently expired. Makes sense now.
The patent has not “become active;” the reason it says ‘2020-01-01 Application status is Active’ in the timeline is because its current status (as of 2020-01-01) is Active. It actually became active on 2013-11-26 when it was granted and published. (If you look at any active patent it will show the same date, and if you look at this patent tomorrow it will show tomorrow's date instead.)
This comes up every single time someone links to a Google Patents search; it's an incredibly misleading bit of UX design.
[Edit: I'm glad to see that the title has been adjusted to remove the “becomes active” bit. It should probably still have (2013) added on the end, though.]
If you look under "Products", you can see that she has a flashcard app called Fluency. However, I can't seem to find the app on iOS or Android app stores.
Also, I still can't seem to find the novel aspect of this patent? The first claim literally denotes the functionality of every current flashcard application.
56 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadhttps://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/licensing-and-copyrighting...
I can't see this patent holding up unless it's for a very specific flashcard system. There is prior art on flashcards going back to the 19th century.
It's possible that newer feature of Anki infringe, and so worst case they might have to revert those, but the basic Anki functionality is safe.
If you want to make a flashcard program, pray to gods Google will take pity on you and not enforce their patent. Otherwise, you better had set aside a couple of million dollars for the patent fight with Google. I mean, the patent will eventually get invalidated, but not before a decade in courts and millions of dollars in costs.
EDIT: Ignore everything I said. I got confused. I apologize. I am not going to change the original comment so the context of the replies would be preserved.
Many organizations dabble in these challenges, but it needs a singular purpose.
The whole premise of the patent process it that you disclose your invention for the good of the population and in return you are granted a temporary monopoly over your invention.
I would never, ever, reference a software patent in order to implement a patented invention. They do not serve as any usable guide for the so called "invention." Therefore they are a perversion of the patent process and should not be granted.
I think GP means so confused they don't know they're confused.
Seems like a wholly reasonable rule, no? We don't want the government to arbitrary grant or deny something without applying the same rules to everyone?
With that said, at a quick glance it doesn't appear that it claims a novel electronic flashcard method, but there could be something I missed.
I mean, there is no such thing. It isn't possible to create something like that. Computers only perform a specific set of actions, and it doesn't matter how you put them together to do the flashcard thing. Or anything. There's nothing novel to be found. It's just math.
We should not grant artificial exclusivity over categories of functionality that computers were designed to provide.
Destroy all software patents.
> Computers only perform a specific set of actions, and it doesn't matter how you put them together..
More or less everything in this world is about understanding how 'elements' work and then how to put them together to invent a new thing.. Medicines (molecules), Design (lines and shapes), Art (colors and mediums), Yoga (Asanas), etc.
Just like in math, we made up the constructs and rules that define what an algorithm or a theorem or a function can be. Because there is a human-defined limited scope of what even constitutes a valid construct (i.e. an "upper limit" of novelty - "this is everything mathematics can do"), anything that exists within this sandbox is therefore less novel. We establish the baseline novelty of the entirety of mathematics as "really powerful, and world changing - and too important to the common good to lock behind a patent." So if that is the upper limit, no individual piece of it can be more novel.
The patent office displays stunning clarity in correctly determining that therefore, any particular instance of maths cannot be patented.
Their failure to apply this same reasoning to software (which is, and always will be, reducible to math) baffles me.
IMO, that's still an extremely broad concept to be granted a patent on.
This comes up every single time someone links to a Google Patents search; it's an incredibly misleading bit of UX design.
[Edit: I'm glad to see that the title has been adjusted to remove the “becomes active” bit. It should probably still have (2013) added on the end, though.]
Here is also a video on how her flashcard tech works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFOm9oM_-A4&feature=share
If you look under "Products", you can see that she has a flashcard app called Fluency. However, I can't seem to find the app on iOS or Android app stores.
Also, I still can't seem to find the novel aspect of this patent? The first claim literally denotes the functionality of every current flashcard application.