A new Apple patent envisions bringing together two or more devices to act as one large, seamless display through sensor technology.
The patent, first reported by Patently Apple, is titled System With Multiple Electronic Devices and was initially submitted in June 2017 and published on March 10. The patent describes seamlessly dividing one image into two separate displays between separate devices, which the patent calls “joint operating mode.”
Getting a patent issued typically costs at least $10,000 and can easily cost upwards of $20,000. Most inventors who patent their inventions hope to get their money back after their invention begins selling in the marketplace. In reality, it rarely works like that. A very high percentage of patents never recoup their filing costs. Put more bluntly: They never generate any income, let alone what it cost to get the patent in the first place.
I’ve been helping inventors commercialize their product ideas and inventions for the past two decades. One of the biggest complaints I hear from inventors is that their patents are basically worthless. These inventors are frustrated and deflated. They’re out of the game, because they’ve spent so much time and money on a single invention — an invention that will never produce them any revenue. They won’t, or can’t, try to bring another, better idea to market because they’ve wasted their resources.
The Supreme Court of Canada is invalidating Pfizer’s patent on the popular erectile-dysfunction drug Viagra for failing to openly disclose the drug’s active ingredient, as required by Canadian intellectual property law.
The 7-0 decision Thursday to open Viagra to competition ahead of its 2014 patent expiration underscores a major difference in how the Canadian and United States courts are interpreting patent laws.
Both nations have so-called “patent bargains” that require the disclosure of a drug’s chemical compounds in enough detail so that scientists can replicate it and learn from the invention, thus benefiting society. In exchange, the inventor, in this case Pfizer, gets the exclusive rights to market the invention for a limited period.
But “sufficiency of disclosure lies at the very heart of the patent system,” the Canadian high court ruled Thursday, and “adequate disclosure in the specification is a precondition for the granting of a patent.”
Dispatches From The Front 