Afraid of Patent Troll for first app I am writing my first mobile-app that teaches a foreign language in a &quot;chat-like&quot; manner. Means, the user enters a chat and you learn the language by having a bot sending you individual messages. You, as a user, can select answers accordingly. This type of app is not new. I saw hundreds of patents for chats, bots etc but I cannot read all of them, neither are chats nor bots new. How do app developers proceed at the stage where I am at?
It depends upon how much money is at stake. You could have a patent search done and consult a patent lawyer help you to evaluate your risk based upon the results. This would cost several thousand dollars but probably less than $10,000 (these amounts are much less than the cost of trying to get a patent for your app). If you do this and there is anyone who has an arguable infringement claim, you would ultimately have to decide for yourself, informed by the search results and your patent lawyer's advice, what to do. Even in a low risk case, you might be sued. Even in a high risk case, the patent holder might decide not to sue you for some reason (patents of the kind you are worried about are weak and often don't hold up in court, about 50% of patent cases that go to trial end up finding that the patent is invalid and that would be higher with a patent of the type you are worried about, but of course, it costs money to go to trial so people often pay nuisance settlements to avoid litigation). You could, instead, launch your app without a patent search and see if anyone sends you a cease and desist letter and then decide what to do from there, possibly consulting a patent lawyer at that point if necessary. It only makes sense to search in advance if your investment and potentially profits from the app are significantly greater than the cost of the patent consultation. If you've invested $100,000 in making the app and expect to make $200,000 of profits from the app, you should definitely confer with a patent lawyer up front. If you've invested $1,000 in making the app and expect to make $2,000 of profits from the app, you should move forward until such time, if ever, as you receive a cease and desist letter from someone claiming to have a patent that covers your app. Somewhere in between those amounts, what to do is a business decision and a judgment call.
Apple has rules for publishing apps on the App Store, and either you follow the rules, or your app won't go on the App Store, simple as that. What you do is either not put your app on the App Store, or make the changes they ask you to make. Why are there conflicting statements? Because Apple and Google are different companies. Does Apple ask the other company? No, why would they spend their time on this, when they can ask you to make the changes? In the end, Apple has huge pockets, so they are not going to approve anything that might give a company a way to take money out of their pocket. What you want to do sounds very much like it could give some company a pretext to sue Apple; that's one thing that Apple won't let happen.
You would be in poorly-tested waters under US law. The invented name &quot;Cthulhu&quot; as appearing in a novel is not protected by copyright. A collection of invented names and other words assembled into a dictionary (e.g. of Klingon) might be found to constitute a copyright-protected creative work. In Paramount Pictures v. Axanar Productions (complaint), plaintiffs partially base their claim on infringement of language; defendants sought to dismiss the suit on various grounds (&quot;questions of law&quot; rather than questions of fact), but the court denied defendant's motion for summary judgment. Subsequently, defendants settled the case. Constructed languages are highly creative expressive works whose elements are deliberately selected for an artistic purpose, and they are not naturally-occurring facts. The copyright office has no position on copyright protection of a constructed language, and any such position would have to come from so-far non-existent (definitive) case law. The dismissal in Paramount v. Axanar doesn't clearly indicate that a constructed language is protected. The primary legal question would be whether the database that you copy into your system is protected. There is a colorable legal argument that a collection of language-like objects. The statutory language in 17 USC 102 does not specifically preclude protection of a wholely-creative database, and the copyright office does not say whether a conlang can be protected because the courts have not ruled one way or the other. The situation in Feist is very different from the case of a work which invents a language from nothing.
The first copyright law dates from 1710, so it's not true that Chekhov wrote before any copyright laws. Any work from prior to 1924 isn't necessarily safe to use (it depends on when the author died). It is in the US but will complicate things if you publish internationally. Unless you translate with something like Google translate, translation is definitely a creative process. This is especially true (although probably not significant legally) for something like a poem, where its' extra hard if you try to keep the original metre and rhyme scheme. If you publish work in the public domain, you would have some claim to the typography. If the translator has done a copyright assignment to the publisher as part of the publishing agreement, they would hold the rights to the translated version.
Copyright doesn't protect methods, only particular fixed expressions. 17 USC 102 Some methods (but not algorithms) may be protected by patent. Diamond v. Diehr 450 U.S. 175 (1981) More exactly, "an algorithm, or mathematical formula, is like a law of nature, which cannot be the subject of a patent". However, in Diamond, the respondents here do not seek to patent a mathematical formula. Instead, they seek patent protection for a process of curing synthetic rubber. Their process admittedly employs a well-known mathematical equation, but they do not seek to preempt the use of that equation. Rather, they seek only to foreclose from others the use of that equation in conjunction with all of the other steps in their claimed process. Said another way: the algorithm cannot be protected, but if you are using the algorithm as part of a method or process that as a whole is patented, you would be infringing the patent. The paper does not have to disclose the patent - you could email the authors to see if they have any patent that protects any particular methods using the algorithm in the paper, but that doesn't rule out patents that the paper author is unaware of.
The basic principle about copyright protection is that the expression of an idea is protected, but the idea itself is not. So wholesale copying without permission is infringing. But the abstract algorithm is not protected by copyright (and let us assume that it also isn't patented). By way of analog, an insertion sort is a pretty easy concept to grasp, and once you understand it, you can re-create it, independent of how the original example (where from you learned about the sort) is expressed. So the question is whether it is necessary for you to copy that code (copyright protects against copying), or can you independently re-express the algorithmic idea (ideas are not protected)?
That is not at all what USPTO is telling you. Courts do not simply "dismiss" patents - that isn't a terminology you'd ever see used for a patent that was found to be invalid. Timeline of events: United Industries Corporation brought a suit against the owner of the patent, claiming unpatentability. That case went to trial, and the court found the claim to be invalid and that UIC failed to show unpatentability. UIC appealed that decision to the Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals dismissed the case because both parties agreed to its dismissal (it's possible they reached some external agreement we don't know about). As far as I can tell, at this moment, the patent is active.
Literal support means that the words of the claim are identical to words in the description. It does not have any particular nuanced meaning. The purpose of that presentation is to demonstrate that the requirements for written description in the US go far beyond literal support. That is, even if the claims are replicated in the description, that is not enough to satisfy the written description requirement (or indeed, the enablement or best mode requirements). In fact, the presentation you link to includes a nice quote from In re Kaslow, 707 F.2d 1366, 217 US PQ 1089 (Fed. Cir. 1983): The test ... is whether the disclosure of the application as originally filed reasonably conveys to the artisan that the inventor had possession at that time of the later claimed subject matter, rather than the presence or absence of literal support in the specification for the claim language. Literal support therefore does not have much place in US law. However, historically, countries inheriting their patent system from the UK had a requirement for fair basis, where the claims had to be fairly based on the description. For example, the now superseded Patents Act 1949 (UK) s 4(4) provided: The claim or claims of a complete specification must relate to a single invention, must be clear and succinct, and must be fairly based on the matter disclosed in the specification. This was a low bar, and literal support (where the wording of the claims are identical to words in the description) would be sufficient (though not required). This gave rise to the practice of having consistory clauses, where the claims were literally copied into the summary of invention section. However, most (or possibly even all) countries have moved on to a support requirement now. Yet the practice of consistory clauses lives on. Literal support also appears in some guise in European law. Art 123(2) EPC provides: The European patent application or European patent may not be amended in such a way that it contains subject-matter which extends beyond the content of the application as filed. This is often imprecisely glossed as a requirement that the wording of an amendment must appear verbatim in the description as originally filed. That is, an amendment is generally allowable if it has literal support in the application (and does not otherwise impermissibly combine embodiments and the like). In practice though, literal support is only one factor for compliance with Art 123(2) EPC, and is neither necessary nor sufficient on its own.