I read this, but I'm not worried because it does seem that the two parties have come to an agreement before. 18 months from now, if the investigation gets that far, perhaps the two parties can sit down and talk it out.

It looks like Paice is trying to shake down Toyota for a larger royalty. They only get $25 per vehicle right now.

What about Honda, Ford, and other Hybrid manufacturers?

As long as my Prius isn't quarantined or taken into court as exhibit #1628, I'm OK with this. Sounds like a shakedown and a huge payday for corporate lawyers.

$4.5 millions is nothing to Toyota (actually much less than the legal fee).
However, this patent hits the most fundamental concept of HSD, Toyota must defend it vigorously.
Money is no issue here.
Injunction is not easy to get unless Paice can put up a large sum of money to convince the judge. We are talking about the money to compensate Toyota's potential loss if Paice lose the case eventually. That would be in hundreds of millions at least. I doubt Paice can put up that kind of money.

W/o the up front money put down, Paice will not likely to get the injunction.

They're not contesting to protect the technology, they're suing to make money, and with no Prius sales, RX 400h sales, etc., no money. Just tactics.

Yeah, those drug dealers are strict.

We may have to arm ourselves and defend our right to keep our babies!!!

It would be interesting to investigate the history of the patent. Toyota (and Ford) use the design thought up by TRW in 1970. I don't know if TRW patented it, or if the patent was kept up. I find it interesting that someone else basically infringed on TRW with their patent for any drivetrain that uses both a gasoline and electric motor.

You cannot patent a concept (such as trying to patent the idea of a hybrid drivetrain). All you can patent is a device or an application of a concept. So I would be surprised if this patent directly addresses the use of 3 inputs (1 gas and 2 electric) and 3 outputs (the 2 electric as generators, and one to power the vehicle) through a planetary transmission, which is exactly what TRW originally invented. If, in fact, the patent drawing shows an in-line design, if I were Toyota I'd for sure fight it (and the company should be going after Honda instead of Toyota).

Our intellectual property laws are seriously messed up. The whole patent system needs an overhaul.

Tom

So that would be ~$5,000 for July. That pays for what, about 10 hours of 'land shark' hours?

Bob Wilson

I can assure you that you can patent a concept. I haven't had a chance to see what patent or patent claims are at issue, but here is Claim 1 from the latest patent (US 7,237,634; there are a total of 306 claims):

1. A hybrid vehicle, comprising:
one or more wheels;
an internal combustion engine operable to propel the hybrid vehicle by providing torque to the one or more wheels;
a first electric motor coupled to the engine;
a second electric motor operable to propel the hybrid vehicle by providing torque to the one or more wheels;
a battery coupled to the first and second electric motors, operable to:
provide current to the first and/or the second electric motors; and
accept current from the first and second electric motors; and
a controller, operable to control the flow of electrical and mechanical power between the engine, the first and the second electric motors, and the one or more wheels;
wherein the controller is operable to operate the engine when torque required from the engine to propel the hybrid vehicle and/or to drive one or more of the first or the second motors to charge the battery is at least equal to a setpoint (SP) above which the torque produced by the engine is efficiently produced, and wherein the torque produced by the engine when operated at the SP is substantially less than the maximum torque output (MTO) of the engine.

As RodJo said, one can patent "concept" under US patent system.
You do not have to implement it before you can file a patent.
Cistco do this all the time within networking domain.

However, even if you have a patent, it is still up to the court to decide whether the patent has any teeth at all. It is basically a "richman's system". You need money to defend your patents.
So many litigation lawyers live off the US patent system. There is huge resistance to overhaul it, even though I agree it is 'sick'.

Well, in the last court litigation it looks like Toyota appealed up to the Supreme Court and still lost. So Paice has probably seen everything Toyota has in its quiver and is likely to have pretty good patents as a result. I think most ITC complaints are ultimately settled, so I'm not too worried.

I know nothing about the dispute so I'm wondering why some think it proves the system is "sick" and needs an overhaul? Is it because an individual had an idea to make the world a better place and protected it (at considerable expense)? Is it because a corporation should be able to do whatever it wants, even copy someone else's invention? Do those same people feel the same way about protecting their own property, or do they let strangers come into their home and take their things? Does anyone also protest whenever Toyota uses its patents?

BTW, there have been various "overhauls" of the patent system in recent years, almost all initiated by large corporations to protect their interest. The misleadingly-named "American Inventors Protection Act" being one example.

So if I got this right, you could patent a 'time machine', even if you haven't got a clue about the technology to make it work?

Uuuuhm, it's 25 dollar, not 25 cents.

No, you must also describe the time machine in sufficient detail to enable one of ordinary skill in the art to make and use it, without having to resort to undue experimentation.

Once you do that you would claim the concept of time travel as your invention, without regard to the details of the machine you used.

It's ok with me... I've got mine already and if they stop em from coming in my Prius would increase greatly in value!

But seriously, there is no way that they will stop them from importing them...

Best case, these guys get buried in court and never get anything from Toyota or stop the cars from being imported.

Worst case, Toyota pays them to shut up and go away which is all they want anyway.

This dispute doesn't prove that the system is sick. The discussion about the intellectual property law system is an ancillary discussion.

At the present time it is very easy to get a "bad" patent; one that should never have been issued. The patent office is handing them out like Cracker Jack prizes. At the same time, a small company with a great idea has little chance of protecting it with a patent, as the burden of defense belongs to the patent holder. Most small companies can be spent into bankruptcy by any large corporation.

In addition, laws haven't kept up with technology. Many of our legal tools are like using a buggy whip on the space shuttle.

Exactly. That's one of the reasons the system needs to be updated.

Tom

Unlike copyrights*, patents have a limited life, and they cost fees every year to renew them; those fees increase the longer you have the patent. TRW did patent, but that patent has long expired.

Patents are meant to involve an 'inventive step', some non-obvious extension to the prior art that makes a distinct improvement on it. The judgement of obviousness is very weak. It's supposed to be non-obvious to a skilled practitioner of the art. Most descriptions I see, in the software field, were very obvious, trivial, anticipated by documentation of the prior art, or so constrained by the problem that the choices of solution were so limited as to be no choice at all.

It's usually hard to judge, as an engineer, if there is a definite improvement because the patent is couched in patent-lawyer-ese, not in any language that the engineer can understand.

The whole system is broken. It was meant to be a public repository of solutions so that we didn't have to keep reinventing the same thing time and again, and instead spend time and resources on making real progress, with the inventors modestly compensated for revealing their secrets. The prospect of triple damages for 'wilful' infringement in fact causes lawyers to advise engineers not to read patents (not that we can read them): if you have viewed the patent, a verdict of wilful infringement is likely even if your opinion was that the patent did not cover your product.

I'm really not sure how to fix it. The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. No, wait, that was Shakespeare. We need to get rid of the legalese. It must be intelligible to people skilled in the art. You need a jury of such people to determine whether there is an inventive step in there. (This may be hard to do; often the jury would be competitors of the inventor.) Maybe set out the royalty schedule in statute so people can't be held to ransom. Independent invention does not get an award to the first to file: if you can show you invented the same thing independently, it nullifies the whole patent as it clearly was obvious.

* Copyrights are supposed to expire, but the idiot politicians keep extending it retroactively every time Mickey Mouse gets close to being out of copyright.