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Bluetooth Lawsuit
Krish writes "The Seattle Times reports that a local Washington state group is suing cellphone makers for patent infringement on bluetooth devices. Research conducted by a University of Washington undergraduate more than a decade ago has become the subject of a lawsuit filed against some of the largest cellphone manufacturers in the world.
The suit claims that consumer electronics giant Matsushita and its Panasonic unit, as well as Samsung and Nokia, are infringing on four patents sold under the 'Bluetooth' name."
I think there should be a certain time limit set on patent infringement cases called "the dumbass period" where after that time has passed, you're a complete dumbass for just realizing the patent infringement then and your case is automatically thrown out. Unless he was stuck in a desert island for the last couple years and just got rescued, he or the group or whatever should stop this pathetic attempt at scamming some money from companies.
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the article was kind of vague. this is the patent in question. Personally, it seems kind of obvious, but that's how it goes.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The article is a bit light on details. The only mention I can find is "The patents trace back to Ed Suominen, a student who was studying radio design at the University of Washington before receiving a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1995." What specific invention did the cellphone manufacturers infringe on? Why did they wait so long to file suit?
God i hate all these people who have the most simple, easy to come to conclusion implimentation patents. It just pisses me off big time that company's patent this stuff and then cry wolf when someone else comes to the same conclusion on their own. It's just someone wanting to make money and nothing more.
The patent was filed in 2001 and granted in 2003, however, bluetooth was developed in 1994 and formally announced in 1998. It seems kind of backwards to me that someone would try to patent technology that has been circulating for a few years, let alone that someone would grant said patent.
You've confused UW and WSU. University of Washington is where Pine was developed and the student in TFA studied. Washington State University ('wazzu') is where the drinking and sports occur.
If I recall, the US govt paid Qualcomm over 100 million dollars to do R&D on RF technology for military communications. Then just as the technology started to become developed in the market, they patented the shit out of everything to do with CDMA. I always thought that was sort of unfair, after all my tax money paid for that R&D, and even if it didn't - it seemed like there was incentive was already out and that it was going to be invented anyhow,
That's "not going to sit back" in the exact same sense that I'm not going to sit back and post to a slashdot non-story, trashed, and listening to cricket at 4:30 in the morning.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Bluetooth is a protocol it doesn't describe the hardware implementation.
The said patent seems to be hardware related.
Bluetooth is a fairly loose protocol in a lot of ways. It's conceivable that certain implementations of Bluetooth could infringe on patents. In fact, the article supports this:
"You can find a way to do it [use Bluetooth] that doesn't infringe on the patents, or you can buy it from Broadcom. That's why WRF is not going to sit back and let it go without it being addressed," Lisa said. Seems obvious that a specific implementation of Bluetooth could infringe on patents filed after the Bluetooth standard was created.
Bluetooth is a protocol it doesn't describe the hardware implementation.
The said patent seems to be hardware related
But isn't the old pro-software patent argument that hardware=software? So once you've described it in any way, that would count as prior art for hardware or software or anything in between?
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There is. Its called LACHES!
http://www.converium.com/2103.asp
Actually, the athletics department is self-supporting. They don't receive any money from tuition, royalties, etc.
The University policy on IP revenue is here, but after administrative expenses are deducted, it basically boils down to 1/3rd going to the inventor, 1/3rd going to the department the inventor works in, and 1/3rd goes into University-wide research funds.
If you look at the first page of the 2003 patent, it says that the patent is a continuation of another (filed in 1999), which is a division from an application filed in 1996, which became this patent. So, they started the ball rolling in 1996. The details make my eyes glaze over, so I'm not sure how different the patents are, but on the surface, they appear to be based on the same research. It's possible that the patent system moves to slowly that it wasn't until 2003 that the research was fully covered.
The Windows Bluetooth drivers definitely do seem to be an absolute disaster, at least as far as the WIDCOMM ones are concerned. AFAIK, the problem arises because the WIDCOMM driver (which is made by someone other than the hardware manufacturer -- the HW mfrs. just toss it in as an alternative to rolling their own) use the hardware ID of the BT device as part of license enforcement. But a lot of cheap BT devices seem to have zeroed-out hardware IDs, plus the driver doesn't seem to be too good about realizing when you've moved the same BT dongle from one computer to the other, or replaced an old one with a new one, etc., and generally it causes no end of grief.
But the question that I immediately start wondering is: "why is everyone using these WIDCOMM drivers?" It seems like they suck royally. But Microsoft has a separate BT stack, I believe, and obviously Apple has one as well (since I have a dongle plugged into my G5 which works perfectly). And if I'm not mistaken, somewhere in Linux there must be a Bluetooth stack that's GPL. (Actually a quick Google seems to turn up three distinct Linux BT stacks.) So it seems pretty clear that the WIDCOMM stack is inferior. Why are people tolerating it? And why are the manufacturers paying WIDCOMM for something that's otherwise free? (Are the Linux BT stacks patent-encumbered a la LAME, and have to be built up from source or something?)
You'd think Microsoft would step in here and produce a software stack that doesn't suck, because from where I'm sitting, it looks like a major point to MacOS for "just working" again. (And possibly to Linux too, but I've never tried using Bluetooth there.) Allowing people to produce shoddy, cut-rate products makes the platform look bad, and Windows isn't so big as to be immune from the cumulative effects of a million crummy devices.
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actually, from TFA they are suing the handset makers, not the chipset manufacturers. "Matsushita, Samsung and Nokia are some of CSR's largest customers, said WRF attorney Steven Lisa. Instead of suing CSR, he said the organization decided to act against the handset makers because the chipset manufacturer may not know which chips are headed to the United States, where the patent is enforceable, but the device-maker would."
Here are Suominen's patents on Google Patents. The relevant WU patent seems to be 6,631,256: Simplified high frequency tuner and tuning method.
It's a design for an image-rejecting mixer with low intermediate frequency. It's not specific to bluetooth but the type of RF tricks used in this patent are important for building a receiver on a silicon chip while minimizing the number of external analog components.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
From the link:
Patent number: 6631256
Filing date: Oct 27, 2001
Issue date: Oct 7, 2003
Oct 27, 2001 is more than a decade ago? I'd suspect this is not the patent being discussed.
We're probably talking about a few of the older ones (didn't read them, only a quick search on the authors name)
6,631,256 Simplified high frequency tuner and tuning method
6,427,068 Simplified high frequency tuner and tuning method
6,069,913 Method and apparatus for determining an identifying bit sequence in a radio frequency waveform
6,052,748 Analog reconstruction of asynchronously sampled signals from a digital signal processor
5,937,341 Simplified high frequency tuner and tuning method
5,926,513 Receiver with analog and digital channel selectivity
Not unless the software modelled the task using the same mechanism as the hardware, which is unlikely. The fact that two things do the same thing is not necessarily patent-infringing, only that they do it in the same way.
The patent appears to be on hardware mechanisms which would be useful in making a Bluetooth component. As far as I can tell these mechanisms are not required for a compliant Bluetooth implementation, they just help make a good implementation. The claim seems to be that a chip provider used by the companies being sued is using these patented hardware mechanisms without licensing them, not that all Bluetooth implementations are infringing. Seems strange they're not going straight to the chip manufacturer though.
I was thinking about creating bluetooth devices years ago...they must have read my mind! That's it...I'm calling my lawyer!
Oh! when will they learn? Probably never, the size of those monetary damages clouds all reason.
Ah well, that nowhere fast is what the legal industry would call 'manna from heaven', those cases did/do last years. And when they are asked to give legal advice, they say "You're bound to win, just pay us by the day"
If this were really happening, what would you think?
the descendants of the king of Denmark should sue because they are using his name without permission. LOL.... I wish I was a judge sometimes, so I could clean up the docket that has all of these stupid lawsuits pending.....
WRF highlights four patents (seen here: 1, 2, 3, 4) on their technology website dating back to 1996 covering a range of rf technology advances. They all cover building inventions on "...a useful device and method for receiving and tuning RF signals, with quadrature mixing to a near baseband passband performed in continuous-time and image rejection and translation to baseband performed in discrete-time. The device may also be adapted to transmit RF signals if desired."
Simple. They have not patented Bluetooth or anything related to the protocol itself, but have patented a specific way of designing an RF receiver.
That specific way is not specified in the Bluetooth protocol.
Also, this patent isn't limited in any way to Bluetooth only. It can be applied to any RF receiver that is designed in a similar way for any protocol.
Likewise, a Bluetooth chipset manufacturer can choose a receiver architecture that doesn't infringe on this patent. It just may suffer from reduced performance or increased cost. I haven't had time to read the details of the patent, but from what I've seen and other have said, the patent is on a method of implementing an RF receiver in silicon that reduces the number of external analog components needed (and hence the cost) without a significant negative impact on performance.
Whoever submitted the article was an idiot. There is nothing Bluetooth-specific about these patents, and you can't sell a patent under a brand name.
You can sell (or give) ownership of a patent to another entity
You can license the right to use the patent to another entity
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
And if you follow Microsoft's thinking, they could go after any company that has bought any bluetooth hardware, not just the manufacturers or distributors.
You mean here.