Nikonn CoolPix had wifi support in 2005. I'd imagine if you could select specific pictures to upload wherever from the device, that's the whole patent claim invalidated by 4 years. Hell, this article even references a device that Nikon offered to wirelessly transmit images as early as 2003. Find one of these, bring it to the law firm defending Gnome and that should invalidate the patent.
I built a service around 2005 that did realtime photo sync and sharing from mobile devices. Here's a demo video from 2007 (the most relevant part is around 6:45):
...filter the plurality of photographic images using a transfer criteria wherein the transfer criteria is
a subject identification of a respective photographic image within the plurality of photographic images, wherein
the subject identification is based on a topic, theme or individual shown in the respective photographic image;
and transmit, via the wireless transmitter and to a second mobile device, the filtered plurality of photographic images.
Invaliding prior art has to cover every single thing in the claim. (And my hunch is that it's out there).
Based on my understanding, the patent still needs to represent an "inventive step" from the prior art. Let's say you can show that
A. Classifying images based on a (pre-existing?) identification;
B. Filtering images based on classification;
C. Wirelessly transmitting images
were all known at the time. Then you could argue that a "person having ordinary skill in the art" would have known to combine A+B+C to solve the problem. Thus the prior art teaches the invention and the patent should be declared invalid.
This isn't wrong. But it's oversimplified and in practice in the US obviousness arguments have a low likelihood of success, lower if it gets too a jury trial.
You are much better off defending again infringement suits with novelty arguments.
Unfortunately, the Nikon CoolPix would not serve as prior art because it does not appear to have these two elements of the patent.
filtering the plurality of photographic images using a transfer criteria wherein the transfer criteria is a subject identification of a respective photographic image within the plurality of photographic images,
wherein the subject identification is based on a topic, theme or individual shown in the respective photographic image;
That sounds patenting facial recognition (among other things). Not a method for facial recognition, but the very idea of doing facial recognition.
The patent system is so broken. It's as if drug companies, instead of patenting a specific treatment for cancer, were able to patent "treating cancer".
It’s not patenting facial recognition. It’s patenting the specific use case of identifying a subset of images to transfer over the wireless link based on the subject of the image.
Sorry, it seems I forgot to put the word "like" in there, as in similar to.
I understand it's not patenting facial recognition in general, just in the specific case of using facial rec or other techniques (which the lawyers called transfer criteria/subject identification) to identify subjects of images before filtering by subject and transferring them wirelessly.
I stand by the meaning of the simile though. There's nothing original enough to be patentable in that claim.
A specific method for doing facial recognition should be patentable. "Use facial rec to identify individuals in images, then filter for specific individuals, then transfer those images" should not. If we allow patents on use cases, every use case will be patented and eventually the trolls will have a collection of patents that together cover the very idea of recognizing faces.
Like parent said, the patent doesn't actually seem have anything to do with facial recognition. I read it as talking about images that have already been identified, by some unspecified process. The process could be facial recognition, but it could also just be the user herself manually identifying each image.
I do agree that the patent is too unclear and broad, and that everything described must have been already known by 2008.
I'm not fluent in patent lawyer, so I must say you might be right. I read "subject identification" as an active process that was part of the claim, but it could refer to a pregenerated tag instead.
Which would make the patent even more laughable. "Wirelessly transfer all images I've tagged with 'Vacation 2017'" is patentable?
Still sounds awfully general. I mean, it is clearly subjective, but I think the issue is the divide between domain specific technical expertise and lawyers / judges who would argue a patent is exploitable.
filtering the plurality of semantic interpretations using a transfer criteria wherein the transfer criteria is a sensible interpretation of a respective natural language sentence within the plurality of semantic interpretations
Nikonn CoolPix had wifi support in 2005. I'd imagine if you could select specific pictures to upload wherever from the device, that's the whole patent claim invalidated by 4 years. Hell, this article even references a device that Nikon offered to wirelessly transmit images as early as 2003. Find one of these, bring it to the law firm defending Gnome and that should invalidate the patent.