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Smartphones Patented — Just About Everyone Sued 1 Minute Later
This week the US Patent and Trademark Office issued a surprisingly (although I guess it shouldn't be) broad patent for a "mobile entertainment and communication device". Upon closer inspection you may notice that it pretty much outlines the ubiquitous smartphone concept. "It's a patent for a mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files. The patent holding firm who has the rights to this patent wasted no time at all. At 12:01am Tuesday morning, it filed three separate lawsuits against just about everyone you can think of, including Apple, Nokia, RIM, Sprint, ATT, HP, Motorola, Helio, HTC, Sony Ericsson, UTStarcomm, Samsung and a bunch of others. Amusingly, the company actually first filed the lawsuits on Monday, but realized it was jumping the gun and pulled them, only to refile just past the stroke of midnight. "
These guys will be smashed into paste by hordes of the highest paid lawyers on planet Earth first thing Monday morning.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I say, "good for them!".
Perhaps this is just what we need to make congress re-think our amazingly incompetent patent office. Clearly, computers can do all of this stuff, and a cell phone / PDA is just a hand-held version of a computer. Nothing really novel, but that never stopped the patent office.
Unfortunately, I missed my chance to patent patent trolling and further patenting the patenting of patent trolling. Etc.
I don't know, but it works for me.
I have always wondered what patent troll companies got out of filing for patents that obviously have loads of prior art. Have any of them ever been successful at sueing a big company for an obvious concept that has tons of prior art? I cant imagine that any of the companies listed would want to just give money to the patent troll for fear of attracting more of them.
I'd wager that this is someone trying to make a point about how broke the patent system is.
Hmmm...maybe it is Vonage!
Basically you can gather a list of blue sky requirements, write them up in legalese and then apply for a patent. Easy! Any half-witted project manager can do that in their sleep.
It's trivial to list requirements. Actually solving the many problems in realising the requirements is where all the work is, and applications like this indicate nothing like that.
There is no technical detail here that indicates the patent applicant ever intended to make anything or worse - ever solved any of the problems involved in designing a product like this.
That's where I think the patent system fails - you can essentially patent a requirements document without ever needing to progress further. It's not rewarding an inventor, because an inventor would have either created a prototype or created a design sufficiently detailed to allow a prototype to be built.
Patents like this reward the wrong people.
Companies that do this kind of bullshit should not only have their officers face legal action, but their corporate charter revoked and their assets liquidated.
A hardship for the shareholders? Maybe, but also, too fucking bad.
Do this a few times and shareholders will be electing boards with actual morals and ethics beyond "How hard can we screw them." Corporations are a privilege created by the people, for the benefit of the people. If it isn't working out that way, we need to kill them.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
First and foremost, the claims of this patent are not innovative or novel. They are merely obvious incremental advances in product complexity. The reason these people were able to list them all in a patent application years before the technology hit the market is simply because there were significant technical barriers preventing manufacturers from making a device with these features at the time. Without the basic technology to actually build the device, it's not possible to adequately describe the implementation for patent purposes. That brings us to the second major issue: Failure to reduce the idea to practice. The claims are stated, but at the time the patent application was filed there were significant technical limitations that prevented such a device from actually being built by anyone - and the application did not provide solutions to those problems. Moreover, the company did not undertake any ongoing research to find a solution to those problems (they just waited 10 years for others to do so). Consequently the application fails to provide enough information for one "skilled in the art" to reproduce the invention. In other words, it's a "flying car patent" - an idea is described that is not technically feasible and no practical implementation is detailed. I doubt the legal eagles will have too much of a problem shooting this one down. I think the interesting part is that it was ever granted in the first place. This is a fairly clear indication that the USPTO is relying on subsequent litigation as part of the review process.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Could we say that's the way the system _is_ _supposed_ to work now?
Evidently, it doesn't.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
what needs to happen is that they demonstrate, from the get-go, a device that does exactly what the patent describes. Enough of these theoretical patents already - describe, and demonstrate, an actual implementation of the thing and demonstrate how the implementation is non-trivial (+ the usual prior art discovery, etc.)
a) by the time the patent application was filed, it was already obvious
b) they didn't invent it, or they acquired the patent from someone else
c) they have made no effort whatsoever to put the invention into production
Seriously. I'm not at all sure that having their patent case demolished is good enough.
This kind of blood-sucking behavior is so transparently in bad-faith, so anti-productive, and so greedy, that it ought to carry criminal penalties.
Like the people who throw in clauses that trigger penalties and ridiculous interest rates for early payoff on loans, these are not the kind of people who cooperate in a society, they're psychopathic parasites.
But for whatever reason, right now we live in a society that rewards them instead of punishing them.
Tweet, tweet.
Sorry, but the CEO doesn't own the company (the shareholders do) and doesn't have the authority to unilaterally give it way or dissolve its charter. Neither can the CEO levy fines on anyone, any more than you could. He/she could reduce or eliminate their future salary or wages, but then they'd just quit and go somewhere else.
Anyway, your proposal would be truly unfair to those who didn't have anything to do with supporting the decision to file the lawsuit, or who did support it, but in good faith. For the rest the existing penalties are, IMHO, more than sufficient.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Somehow I think the companies in question will /want/ this to drag on, and on, and on... until the patent troll realizes all of its resources are sucked dry. At which point the patent troll will be toyed around with some more in court and finally killed.
HP, Apple, etc. will want to make an example out of this one.
But these trolls are describing a phone that not only had *each* of the features they claim, but in fact had *all* of them and still fit in a hand-held form factor. I'm pretty skeptical about the ability to fit a GPS device into a phone back in 2000 and still have it be hand-held, though hand-held GPS was certainly available. (I'm even more skeptical about the ability to have a satisfactory battery life if you did.) And I'm even more skeptical about the claim that they actually *did* reduce their concept of these devices to practice.
If you're not required to actually come up with the technology to build the thing, I'm perfectly able to imagine one of these things that fits in your ear canal and runs all year without recharging... So send me my check once you've built the thing.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks