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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."
For wireless dial-up access, and I haven't noticed any
Lets hang our heads in shame.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Looks like they'll be paying as they go! Hahahahaha
I guess the name "Freedom Wireless" is an ironic choice.
I read the article. Is this for EVERYONE in the country? What will happen for all the users of these phones. What about tracfone, they've been at it for YEARS, does this affect them? I need clarification or some unfounded speculation, both would be nice.
--sig fault--
BULLSHIT!!!
You'll NEVER stop me from getting FREE WIFI off of my Pringles Can!!!
Take THAT FCC!!!
He then turned and walked defiantly from the court room, only to sheepishly return and ask "Um....anyone have a cell phone?? I need to call my lawyer."
Freedom wireless is crap!
Why is pay as you go patentable?
no big sig
I hope we can rely on federal court to rid us of these patented monopolies.
here
Doesn't include the information I was looking for, but does give a bit more detail.
business model patents really are the great evil of the patent world. See it strangling industry after industry.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
It's also a potential way to get oneself shot in the back of the head...
Just saying. I don't use those services myself, but people with nothing to lose (who might need that kind of service) are a group I personally try not to piss off.
Revenge is a dish I don't want any fucking part of. Particularly when someone's safety might be at stake.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
RTFA, it was a jury trial. Whoever thought that business method patents were a good idea? "Yeah, we'd prefer if we just didn't have to compete in the marketplace -- please give us a government granted monopoly."
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
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
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
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.
Does this mean I'm screwed as well?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
From the summary: "This heralds a farewell to Cingular's Go Phone and Sprint-Nextel's Boost services, both powered by BCGI."
In regards to Cingular, not exactly.
Cingular has two forms of prepaid service (GoPhone).
One is 'Pick-Your-Plan'. You have a reoccuring monthly charge on your credit or debit card which gives you a monthly allowence for service.
The other is 'Pay-As-You-Go'. You buy a prepaid card off the rack, and use that to make your calls on your cell. As you use it up, you replace the card. That's the part that will be affected by this ruling.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
The patents is question are 5,722,067 filed in 1998 and 6,157,823 filed in 2000.
Although this is immediately disgusting, in the not-so-long-run this might end up being a good thing, this is putting a kink in Sprint/Verison and Cingular's (the big mean companies with nearly inexhaustible legal resources) business model, who will likely lash out against it. If all goes well for them, it will end up creating a substantial precedent against this kind of business-method patent, which would inadvertently improve the patent law situation in the U.S., if we're lucky it might even catalyze a wider reform.
If you want to start your own pre-paid phone network, you shouldn't steal Freedom Wireless's way of doing it.
The problem with that logic is that there are likely only a small number of straightforward ways to "properly deduct the right amount of money from the account based on the number of minutes". Seriously, how many different ways are there to implement
customer.balance -= (minutes * rate);
Two independent companies could easily implement this in a very similar (straightforward) way, without "stealing" Freedom Wireless's way of doing it.
I think this could wake up the public to the need for patent reform in a way that other things would not.
Everyone uses wireless, pay as you go is a fairly obvious idea to pretty much anyone. A sudden skyrocketing price for cell phone calls will piss people off quite a bit.
LetterRip
Let this be an example to those of you that pooh-pooh our patent system. See, it works!
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
And Democrats don't have greedy self serving hypocrits in their party? or do you honestly believe that Clinton wasn't a greedy, self-serving hypocrit?
For every republican you can find that's corrupt I can find a democrat...
which goes to show that blaming the party affiliation in a situation is as retarded as pulling the race card (Which the majority of the time is bullshit). There are retards on both sides of the fence and blaming based on party don't fix OR address the real problems - or keep the threads on topic.
If all you can say is 'it must be a republicans fault' your just showing your own ignorance. But... that's just my two cents
You mean the phone counts how many minutes you use it and deducts those minutes from your account as you use them. Gee I never would have thought of doing that. Doh. If it's obvious it shouldn't be patentable. Simply taking a common practice and moving it to a new technology or industry should not qualify as something worthy of a patent.
Intellectual protection laws are shortsighted and don't work. If you can't keep innovating fast enough to profit then you deserve to go broke. Throw everyone to the sharks and let those who are smart enough and fast enough to stay ahead do so and the rest can get ate up and pooped out.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Have you hugged your penguin today?
Yes, your math is painful.
10 * $0.025 * 3,100,000 = $775,000
I have been spending a lot of time in Vietnam recently (6 months of the last year) and while I am there I always use my prepaid mobile phone. It is very sad to see that many companies over there can do it but there is a patent on such a simple idea here in the US.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
I wonder what impact this will have on parents who bought their kids firefly mobile phones. On a related note, I wonder how we can find out what exact brands and subbrands and such are actually affected.
There are 10 types of cliches in this world. Those that are new, and those that aren't.
PRODUCE the thing you patented, or lose the patent. Period. And if you are producing it, be treated (and regulated) as a monopoly in that area, since patents by definition grant monopolies. Patents only on real, tangible, physical items-no business methods, no software, no genetics.
There is NO excuse for the way the patent system is currently. Just because you're the first to do something doesn't mean it's non-obvious. Incremental changes or "improvements" should not be patentable-the inventor of cell phone technology should get a patent, the guy that figures out a better way to use it should not. Nor, generally, should the guy that figures out how to extend range by 10%.
Hopefully, larger companies continually getting hit by these things will lead them to recognize that pretty soon you're not going to be able to move, breathe, or fart without infringing on something patented. I certainly hope that leads them to reconsider the path they're going down, and use their influence to do something worthwhile for once.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
GoPhone, as it currently is, is a rebranding of several of AT&T, Cingular, BellSouth, etc's, old prepaid plans, plus Cingular and AT&T's GSM prepaid plans. I have a GoPhone PAYG SIM, and I can tell you the fact it works on regular GSM phones and the fact the phone knows the real number of the telephone when it does means it's highly unlikely that their current PAYG or PYP plans actually infringe upon the patents. The patents themselves generally cover a myriad of ways of implementing prepaid service, generally by either putting a bogus phone number in the cellphone, which forces incoming calls to be routed via a third party and makes it easy to identify prepaid callers, or by having the phone programmed to make 800 calls and route outgoing calls via that.
This probably explains Cingular's insistance that this will not affect the majority of their prepaid customers.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
is affected, which means the old ATT TDMA people "free2go" plan.
The GMS Pay as you go, and pick your plan are not affected.
We got to get Allan Ralksky to email the message to everyone...
Oh well, what the hell...
We on planet Earth call it GSM.
No, I'm sorry, they can't implement it in any form without infringing my patents. You see, I have a patent on the subtraction operation. Everybody who subtracts two numbers without a license from me is in danger of prosecution (thieves, stealing my valuable IP). And don't try that "I'll just add a negative number" because it won't hold up in court (and hasn't).
You'll be hearing from my lawyer soon concerning your willful, unlawful proliferation of the subtraction operation on a public message board without licensing it first.
"Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation." - Richard Feynman
How can the Mafia sue the **AAs for stealing their business model if "there is no Mafia"?
You seem not to get it. The **AAs you speak of are the Mafia (music and film industry associations). Here's proof.
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.
Better would have been "Every time someone litigates over a stupid patent, God kills a kitten." Please think of the kittens.
The US has for a long time been trying to export their patent laws overseas. In many african and asian countries it is a mandatory requirement for aid, trade, etc. By systematically patenting every obvious idea under the sun the US can continue it's "Perpetual Economic Expansion" by bringing patent serfdom to the rest of the world.
Once the US has a hold on the patent system and has established laws worldwide to protect the interests of US patent holders, it will be possible to sit back, let the developing countries do the work, and reap the profits. It's a brilliant strategy.
People living in developing countries (including me) must do everything in their power to lobby their governments to reject US patent laws. They could well be a noose around our neck and keep us in serfdom forever.
Hey, at least nothing is changing...
>>> But... that's just my two cents
That's two AND A HALF cents, buddy, PER MINUTE.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
That's not what the parent is talking about. He's talking about whoever implements the idea first. These patents people are getting arne't "solving any fundamental problems", it's people patenting broad ideas that have many implementations AND NOT EVEN DOING ANYTHING WITH THEM. We're not talking innovation here...
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
Well, your example is a red herring. I'm a strong believer in that if such a thing were to happen, you would have really gotten a patent. I have to think that in such a situation, it would be apparent that your new and improved method of making an IC 10 times faster is not obvious or someone would have come up with it already. That's not really the case with computer software. With the rapid advancement in software capability and the fact that most of the software patents out there are apparently not non-obvious ideas, it strikes me as odd that the USPTO would issue so many patents.
It almost seems as though the patent examiners don't actually do anything but stamp it. My god, this is terrible. At least when Amazon got their one-click shopping patent they had a functioning website to back it up. These guys didn't even have that. They decided that it must be a new and novel thing to use a database to correlate phone numbers with used minutes. Freakin duh! Isn't that what databases were designed for?
This company doesn't just deserve to have their patent cancelled, they deserve a good inquisition for anti-competitive behavior.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I'm calling the Police.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
as 90% of the time I use one it's for work, and it means a headache (no one ever calls to tell me I'm doing a great job, they only call with problems), but for emergencies, last minute groceries and running late the wife and I both have a Tracfone. It's running about $20 USD/month for both of us.
I use very few minutes - I'm lucky if I'll use 60 minutes over the course of a month. If I want to talk to someone and have a conversation longer than: "I'm running slightly late, will be there in 15," then I'll go on Skype and communicate with them that way.
My cellular handset is mainly for text messaging and emailing on the move - that and using the inbuilt camera to take photos and videos.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic