Q: Snapchat's patent. What is legal?
I am an app developer. I have a few questions regarding Snapchats patent owner rights. Patent no.: US9407712B1 claim 1 states in english that no other application can use automatic deletion for an ephemeral object (a picture). Does this mean that no other app can use the function where you can send a picture which is deleted after a decided time period? I have seen that apps like Instagram does in fact use an equivalent feature in Instagram Direct, where a picture can be viewed once, before its deleted. Any answer or advice is much appreciated. Thank you.
A:
To answer this correctly, a patent attorney would need to read not just the claims but also the complete specification and likely at least a portion of the documents exchanged back and forth with the patent examiner in response to initial rejections of the claim.
This sort of very detailed question is not a great fit for off-the-cuff answers from patent attorneys providing general information to folks using a web site.
If this is critical to your current or potential plans for your business, you may need to pay a patent attorney to dive into the details.
I hope this helps.
Kevin E Flynn
Peter D. Mlynek agrees with this answer
A:
There is much more to this patent than simply automatic deletion of an ephemeral object. In order to be within the claims, the computer-implemented method must be within the scope of ALL parts of the claims.
What matter is not what the computer system does, but how it does it. There may be ways of an app perform automatic deletion of ephemeral objects, without being in the scope of each of the three claims (i.e., Claims 1, 6, and 11). For example, you may be outside of the scope of Claim 1, if, for example, there is no designated recipient; or if there is no evaluation of the object; or the evaluation of the object is performed differently than as recited in the claims; or there is no pushing of the object to an edge server cache; or the pushing in performed differently than as recited in the claims; or if there is no cache management rank ascribing; or if the ascribing is not based on historical use patterns; etc. You need to do this for each of the 3 independent claims.
If your app does automatic deletion in a different manner, and it is very clear that your app does it differently, then likely there is no problem. But if it looks like that you are close, you should see a patent attorney to give you more guidance. The patent attorney may look at the patent and your products and tell you for a few thousand dollars that it is not a problem. But if you are too close, you may need to spend a few tens of thousands of dollars for the patent attorney to study the patent in depth and to provide you with a non-infringement opinion.
Good luck!
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