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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.
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.
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.
/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.
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.
Come on, make my day, patent punks!
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'' Apple should be rejoicing, since they claim that the patent system is running perfectly. ''
Just shows that you didn't read properly. In that recent discussion, Google said that the patent system itself is broken. Apple said the patent system is fine, the related litigation system is broken. And clearly it is.
The other example mentioned was Microsoft being ordered to pay $1.5bn over two MP3 related patents. We all know that MP3 is covered by a few hundred patents, and Microsoft paid a few million for a license for all those patents, so one or two patents they missed could never be worth $1.5bn.
Well, it is pretty obvious that they were using touch screen keyboards in Star Trek: TNG, they even blip when you press them. Not sure if it counts as prior art since the setting is the 24th century, but still.
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If you keep bailing out the patent system by having judges rescue the companies with the power you are gonna get stupid hypocrites like Apple's recent statement that the system is fine and no one will change it.
And, funnily enough, the Judge in the MS case has just overturned the original decision. Leaving Alcatel hopping mad at the whole patent madness http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6934363.stm?
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
Has SP technologies even tried out an iPhone? Their claim is for an immutable keyboard. I can make the keyboard on an iPhone disappear quite easily...
For those who haven't bothered reading the SP tech. patent on touchscreen keyboards - it's basically an "improvement" on existing touchscreen keyboards. The "improvement" is that the keyboard is not resizable, movable, minimizable, etc. It appears on the screen in one location and cannot be removed or hidden (until it is no longer needed, at which point it could disappear). The patent includes sample Visual Basic code - also absolutely horrible!! Read on for brief entertainment. 1. choose patent at random 2. remove some functionality 3. patent "improvement" 4. sue 5. Profit?? Shit.. that didn't work.
Al