Federal Court Shuts Down Pay As You Go Wireless

self assembled struc writes "BCGI has been found guilty of infringing on pay-as-you-go wireless patents owned by Freedom Wireless. This means that cellular providers who use BCGI pay-as-you-go billing systems must immediately stop selling new service. For the next 90 days, as they wind down their service, they will have to pay Freedom Wireless 2.5 cents per airtime minute used PER CUSTOMER. This heralds a farewell to Cingular's Go Phone and Sprint-Nextel's Boost services, both powered by BCGI."

Comments

Background on Litigants, from Wall Street Journal

[Landaras]

I remember reading about this case a few weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal. The article was entitled "Patent litigants pose growing threat to business."

The first paragraph brought to light one of Freedom Wireless' founder's criminal past (it involved stolen cars) as well as the fact that the founders had previously gone after GTE for similar issues (alleging stolen trade secret). GTE ended up getting paid $90,000 in legal fees, a statement that GTE had never stolen a trade secret, and a promise never to sue GTE again.

Fast forward a few years. Freedom Wireless currently does nothing but patent ligitation. These men are patent trolls.

The Wall Street Journal charges for their archives, but the full text of the same article is available here.

- Neil Wehneman

Re:Lets yell

[Lemmy Caution]

See, one of the problems of the political culture in this country is this: the people who are suspicious of corporate power are too trusting of government power to allocate resources for social change; the people who are suspicious of government power have a hard-on for the public sector (without realizing that wealth will always - always - muster power to protect itself) and, often, for the military. (The biggest weak-point in libertarian thinking is class-blindness - they think they are serving hard-working middle- and-upper-middle-class americans without understanding that this is exactly the class the created the Leviathan of state to begin with, and in whose interests it ultimately works.) This means that the political will to muster things like a reform of patent law will never occur unless it happens in a way that is in the interests of power.

Which may be happening here: the Cingulars and Nextels may start getting annoyed enough by the absurdities of patent law and the effect on their bottom line that they start to lobby for a change. Unfortunately, the change is not likely to make things any easier for the bulk of us.

Re:Might be a good thing...

[PAPPP]

I'm certainly not saying they're doing this for the greater good, but look at Sony v. Universal (aka the betamax decision ), Sony was fighting for profits, but ended up establishing the substantial non-infringing use argument, inadvertently doing something for the greater good as a result of their "profit protecting". Also notable, the betamax format failed anyway, and the decision is now reviled by their entertainment divisions, the good part outlasted the greed.

something obvious

[John Sokol]

I haven't seen the patent first hand, but often something obvious now, wasn't at that time. If it were then why wasn't someone else doing it already.

    I can list many examples of this. The mouse, keyboard, screens, printers, windowing environment, The Internet, an Operating system and even a CPU and the IC chips, were at the time major conceptual steps forward.

  I can't tell you how hard it was to explain what the Internet or even a Network was to people in 1983, they just couldn't grasp it.

  With patents if someone has been doing something then a patent gets filed by another person at later date, then the group getting sued must try to show that, if they can the patent holder will have to pay like multiple damages and costs.

  So as a patent holder you never want to go to court with a weak patent.

  But in practice, most people loose their nerve at the first letter from a patent holder, even if its a weak patent that wouldn't hold up.

  As a result many people end up paying royalties or giving up without a fight, when they really would win and have that patent tossed out.

  I have come to realize much of patent law is a poker game.

  For a large company like Microsoft they look at the strength of a patent and the value of the company holding it and decide is it cheaper to pay or infringe. And same in reverse, even if a patent isn't worth the paper it's written on, if the company they sue can't afford to challenge it, then they win.

    AT&T did this to many companies they felt were competition, file dozens of bogus suite against one company, from many little companies they control, and drive the small players out of business while leaving there name out of it.

Re:America

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

Apparently they patented the idea of using a database to keep track of your wireless usage:

Freedom Wireless, a four-person company, has never set up an actual business serving customers; it seeks royalties from companies like BCGI, Verizon Wireless, and Nextel Communications Inc. At the heart of Freedom's 1996 patent is the idea of using a computer to match a cellphone number with a database showing how many paid-up minutes the cellphone owner has, then deciding whether to complete a call.

I guess no one's ever thought up that particular use for a database before...

Eminent Domain?

[serutan]

Local governments can kick people out of their houses for the sake of public works projects, and lately they've been doing it for commercial projects. The federal government can void patents in the name of national security. I'm not in love with either practice, but as long as those are the rules we have to live under why can't the principle of eminent domain be invoked to override a patent claim that denies a valuable service to a significant number of people. Especially if the technology has been in use for a while.