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Netflix Sued Over Fradulently Obtained Patents
An anonymous reader writes "Techdirt has a story about a new class action lawsuit against Netflix, claiming that the patents the company is using to sue Blockbuster were obtained fraudulently. Specifically, the lawsuit claims that Netflix was well aware of prior art, but did not include it in its patent filing, as required by law. The lawsuit also claims that Netflix then used these fraudulently obtained patents to scare others out of the market, in violation of antitrust law. 'Certainly, it makes for an interesting argument. Patents grant a government-backed monopoly -- which should get you around any antitrust violations. However, if that patent is obtained fraudulently, then I can see a pretty compelling claim that you've abused antitrust law. It would be interesting if other such cases start popping up (and, indeed, the lawyer who sent it to us said his firm is looking for additional patents to go after in this manner).'"
patent troll troll?
It would be nice to see this force reasonable patent reform.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
This is semi-offtopic at this point, but here's a good start, ban lawyers from holding political office. 90% of the problems we have with lawyers stem from the fact that almost all politicians started as lawyers, and so it's impossible to pass any laws that have a negative impact on the income of lawyers, and laws pass all the time that improve the income of lawyers.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
I have patented several products and have a patent pending (in manufacturing, not in software, so please no-one try to dissolve me in acid) for products and techniques I think are at least fairly innovative. That said, it's no use blaming the lawyers for the state of affair in the US and Canada. The fact that they're needed at every step of the process -- truly and absolutely needed -- is a testament not to lawyers greed but to legislative bloat.
Now, you can argue that lawyers and lawmakers form a recursive loop, but I'll leave that for people smarter than I.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
I can see Blockbuster suing them, or some other company whom Netflix threatened. But I can't imagine that there are enough of those companies to form a "class".
The article is pretty vague on exactly what the evidence is. The actual lawsuit is more informative, but harder to read.
The class (as I finally figured out on page 17 of the lawsuit) is Netflix customers, of whom Dennis Dilbeck is the representative sample. They're suing based on the idea that Netflix's prices are higher than they should be, because competition by Blockbuster should have brought prices down. I just can't see a judge buying it; these people all paid for Netflix's service at the asking price voluntarily.
From what I've read so far, I'm just not buying their claim. They are citing one patent in particular, which is about delivery of resources based on people making requests on a computer, but that's considerably different from Netflix's rental queue.
(I'm assuming that patents are not a completely stupid idea. Please, if you're in the "all patents are inherently evil" category, can you just assume that I agree with you and go preach to the choir in some other thread?)
I don't consider Netflix's idea at all obvious. I thought it was pretty neat when I came up with it: the idea of a rental service which doesn't have a due date is pretty cool and I'd never heard of it.
I know we hate patents, but I hate idiot class-action lawsuits even more. I've been involved in dozens of them; I literally throw them away unopened when they arrive in the mail. The lawyers always make money and I always get a coupon for 30 cents off my next bag of Chex Mix.
Sometimes, I'm even suing myself. Some of those lawsuits were shareholders suing the company. Well, I'm still a shareholder, so I'm suing myself.
All the lawyers need to find is one fool member of the class to make a claim, and the company will often settle rather than fight. It's free money for class-action lawyers.
this comes as no surprise to any big corporation, I think. There's a reason why, at Microsoft (for instance), you are told to *not* investigate whether something is patented or not. Just do it. That way, should it go to court, they can honestly claim that they had no idea about prior art and thus be in line with law.
:)
Slightly ironic.
What company HASN'T done this?
This isn't fraud, this is standard operating procedure.
Change the way patents are granted and prosecuted.
1) Make the bar of being granted a patent much higher. The applicant should have to demonstrate significant effort to make the invention. It should take far more effort to invent something than to patent the results.
2) For each patent, give adequate notice to the public to give them a chance to protest the patent. Hold as many hearings as necessary before the patent is granted.
3) Require a demonstration of the patent if there is any doubt over whether or not the applicant has ever actually built one.
4) Make patents non-exclusive. Any inventor should be able to use, sell, and market his own inventions, even if someone invented the same thing first. If he went to substantial effort to invent the item with no knowledge of products containing the same invention or of the patent, either permit him his own patent or add him to the previously existing patent. Reserve licensing of the patent to other parties for the first inventor only.
5) Before a patent lawsuit may be initiated, require the patentee to notify the infringer and give him adequate notice of his patents and ample opportunity to stop using the invention. Enable the infringer the ability to request a hearing over the question of whether or not the patent was rightfully granted.
6) Permit the patent owner to recover damages only from willing infringers. That would be someone who either knew about the patent before using it or who continued to use it more than a year after being given notice of his infringement.
7) Base the damages awarded on the greater value of the invention to the patent owner and to the infringer. That is, if the patent owner and the infringer is only making minor use of the patent internally, than the patent is not worth much and damages would be minimal. If one of them is actively selling devices for which the patent is a major portion of the device, then the value of the patent would be greater.
8) Require the patentee to actually use the patent in order to recover damages.
A method of placing an order for an item comprising: under control of a client system, displaying information identifying the item; and in response to only a single action being performed, sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system; under control of a single-action ordering component of the server system, receiving the request; retrieving additional information previously stored for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request; and generating an order to purchase the requested item for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request using the retrieved additional information; and fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase of the item whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping cart ordering model.
The way you described the game doesn't teach how to do the client-server part of the claims and proving that it's obvious an engineer skilled in the art could just throw together a system like that from seeing what you descibed is a LOT harder.
A good example: say I invent a warp drive or a phaser or what have you. The fact that it's been shown on Star Trek for the last 40 years doesn't count as prior art because from watching the show it's not obvious how to construct one. But if I tried to patent say a LCARS-style layout of buttons, then you might have a good argument for unpatentability since those layouts are shown all the time.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
That is simply absurd. Two or three years seems like a reasonable period a junk patent, but this is terribly unfair for meaningful discoveries which arguably justify a patent, like RSA.
Hypothetically, let us say that a researcher independently discovered a new algorithm which performed discrete Fourier transformations 2x faster than anything we have today. The commercial and societal value of this discovery is pretty huge. Two or three years of exclusivity couldn't do justice to the impact of this huge discovery.
(No, I am not endorsing patents on algorithms. RSA shouldn't have been patentable. It's just shortened patent periods is not a reasonable compromise, and far from 'Insightful')
Nobody (that I'm aware of) does a patent search on a new design that they don't intend to patent.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!