Patent Lawsuits Galore

eldavojohn writes "Guess who owns the patent on the touch-screen keyboard. Not Apple — SP Technologies has filed a suit based on just that. Ars brings out the intriguing detail that the founder of the patent troll company is serving prison time for health-care fraud." Read on for four more patent developments in the day's news.
Today the news broke that Aloft is suing Microsoft and Adobe for deliberately violating the patent entitled 'Network Browser Window with Adjacent Identifier Selector.' Qualcomm had a bad day as the US Trade Representative advised the President not to intervene in the patent beef it is losing against Broadcom. Today we found out Sharp is suing Samsung for an LCD infringement. Ending an eventful day on a note of sanity, a judge today threw out the jury verdict on Alcatel-Lucent vs. Microsoft and Microsoft no longer has to pony up $1.5 billion.

Comments

Not "the" but one of many "a"s

[pieterh]

Guess who owns "a" patent on the touch screen keyboard. Actually, on a supposed improvement to the touch screen keyboard. This is the lovely thing about patents in general and software patents in particular; you can claim so many patents for the same thing.

The humble network plug is covered by about 45 patents iirc. At least that's a finite number.

But the average humble user interface is covered by hundreds, thousands of patents, each for minor improvements (if at all) on other peoples' work.

Software patents are designed for one thing only: to allow lawyers to parasite off engineers. /me waits for the patent lawyers to reply to this post, telling me how utterly wrong I am, and how without software patents no-one would write software.

Come on, make my day, patent punks!

Re:It's up to you, unless I don't agree

[TheRaven64]

The idea behind a jury trial is that you are tried by a jury of your peers. The problem with the current implementation of the system is that you are actually tried by a load of random, often uninformed, people. In cases hinged on domain-specific information, there should be an understanding that your peers must be people who understand the subject matter. A good jury for the SCO vs. IBM case would have been selected from kernel developers for QNX, BSD, etc (no System V or Linux developers, to prevent a conflict of interest). In the case of a copyright infringement case between two songwriters, a jury of other composers would have been able to make an informed decision.

The difficulty with implementing this kind of system is that if you do it in a way that allows people to volunteer for jury service in a specific case then you undermine the system even more.