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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. "
I would be pissed that all these tech companies rake in the money by ripping off my invention. Good thing the patent system protects our geniuses from intellectual property theft.
no "smartphone" required. my 2 year old Verizon LG VX8300 is a "... mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files ..."
These guys will be smashed into paste by hordes of the highest paid lawyers on planet Earth first thing Monday morning.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Can you hear me now?
putting abusive people in jail would make them think twice
they cost money to other companies, but also to state and law
how can tribunal tolerate such behaviour and not fine a big toll ?
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
Do these people think they can actually win any of those lawsuits? They have to realize that all those organizations have hordes of lawyer minions at their disposal that will beat them into a fiscal pulp!
Weaksauce as they say...
Finally, a firm got enough balls to blatantly abuse the living crap out of the patent system. Maybe this will start the much needed rework of the patent system.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
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.
Update kit consists of one drop of superglue, which you apply to the flash card. Presto -- no removable storage.
Who's laughing now, Mr. Patent Troll?
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.
They do realize that IBM, from it's lofty perch near the top of the Fortune 500, doesn't take too kindly to patent extortion? Especially pathetic ones like this? The same IBM that is a company that does not manufacture phones of any kind, smart or otherwise? The same IBM that has a larger patent portfolio than the next-highest competitor by a substantial margin? The same company that probably has a patent on breathing and a another patent on filing patent lawsuits? The same IBM with a quite famous, take-no-prisoners legal strategy? The same IBM that just spent more in legal fees fighting SCO than the company was worth?
Methinks a couple of those plaintiffs are going to get dropped from the suit, quite quickly. Unless of course IBM wants to make an example of them (not out of the question), in which case they will have their patent forcibly invalidated, with maybe some Sherman Act sprinkled on top for good measure.
SirWired
everyone?
I just roll my eyes and think is the USPO as dumb as the Fed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone
The first smart phone was developed way back when. But let's consider a more recent example:
The Nokia Communicator line was the first of Nokia's smartphones starting with the Nokia 9000, released in 1996.
The earlier chained patents was 1997. So I really wonder what pot, and I do mean pot, the people in the patent office are smoking.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
This is one of the best cases for a production phone/pda that is prior to this filing:
HP OmniGo 700LX
If you get such a patent, put it in a shell company, sell the stock, many billions, move on, goto 10.
My little Linux and tech blog
I'd wager that this is someone trying to make a point about how broke the patent system is.
Hmmm...maybe it is Vonage!
Patent trolls wouldn't exist if this type of asshatery didn't work. Not only can they win this but they likely will at least see large amounts of cash from some source that is much bigger than them and seeks to improve their patent portfolio which will be used to trade for the use rights of other corporations' patents.
No, they will make their blood money, lawyers will be happy, and the barrier to entry in this industry will be raised higher.
Overhaul the U.S. patent system now!
I noticed that they left out God...!!!!
Do you think I could patent the business model of patent trolling? Then sue all the companies needlessly tying up our legal and patent systems with this crap. Just a thought... maybe Ive just been at work too long.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Bueller?
Generally a patent cannot just be a bunch of parts thrown together. There has to be coherence to it, an unexpected synergy that makes the whole more than the sum of the parts.
I'm trying to find the synergy here. Pure convenience, perhaps?
Sometimes they do .. for example the RIMM versus a patent holding company called NTP:
.. but I dunno what it does to the conscience.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/03/technology/rimm_ntp/
Other situations companies settle such as this one where a company claimed it owned rights to JPEG
http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2005/02/21/daily14.html
So yeah, patent trolling can be quite lucrative from a financial standpoint
It details 125 combinations of things in a hand-held device.
Here's the first the rest are an extensive list of variations on the theme:
1. A mobile entertainment and communication device for communicating with the Internet and remotely located telephones, comprising: a housing of a palm-held size; a cellphone provided in said housing, said cellphone adapted for selectively and wirelessly connecting to the Internet and remotely located telephones and adapted for controlling selection of at least one of (1) downloading data or uploading data from or to the Internet, or (2) downloading data to a computer or other electronic device and said cellphone having at least one of (1) voice controlled dialing, (2) a wireless earphone or (3) a wire connection jack earphone with a microphone for operation of the mobile entertainment and communication device; a memory operatively connected to said cellphone; a microprocessor operatively connected to said memory; said microprocessor adapted for storing data to said memory that is received from the Internet or a remotely located telephone; and a display panel operatively connected to said microprocessor, said display panel adapted for reproducing images or other data from at least one of said memory or the Internet, said other data including at least one of moving images, combined sounds and moving images, or music with or without images.
The whole thing looks like the product of a brainstorming session with everything under the sun included in the list.
The patent was filed on Nov 20, 2003. It lists an inventor but they haven't invented anything as far as I can tell only tried to be the first ones to list these items together in a patent application. In going over the list I doubt there's anything to terribly non-obvious in there. I'd be surprised if this isn't challenged rather than just paid out, but that's just an opinion and IANAL.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
Seriously, soon as I RTFA, the first thought that went through my head was that SOMEBODY has had enough of the USPO and decided to make as big a splash as possible, using a device that most people own, as a means to bring the entire issue to the PUBLIC, at large.
I doubt they are trying to actually win this thing, but merely point out that there are some SERIOUS problems with the patent system.
What better way to do so then to do it in grand fashion? The media are going to put up articles stating such stuff as "Is your cellphone doomed?", etc. etc.
Let the media do the ground work.
So, calm down. If it works, the patent system will get the desperately needed overhaul it deserves as a result.
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.
i've been going through the motions of getting some software patented (using a specialist law firm in chicago) and mid-way through the process, i stopped proceedings to entirely rework / rethink the project, because some troll like this had written a patent for something disturbingly simple, and worded it such that it expanded miles beyond it's scope... to a point that it encroached on... well... everything...
every time i see cases like this, i have to wonder... do i just need shadier patent lawyers? or should i just rely on the people who review these things to be completely blind to all prior art?
now is the winter of our discotheque
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.
I'm going to guess one of the parties being sued is going to try to kill this patent in short order, but who really knows? Of note, the patent (US7321783) is likely claiming priority to US6278884 which was filed in April '97 so any useful prior art would likely have to be around that time frame or before
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
"He Who Dares Wins"
I thought the title of the submission was just figuratively describing the speed of the lawsuits by saying "1 minute later" but that's exactly what happened.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
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.
I think the Nokia Communicator 9000 was the first Smartphone, certainly in Europe. It was first introduced in 1996, and presumably in development for some time before that.
"I hereby swear under penalty of perjury that I am filing this lawsuit in good faith. Furthermore, if my lawsuit is found to be without merit, and is dismissed with prejudice, then my corporate charter shall be dissolved, and my corporation's holdings shall be split and sold to the highest bidder at public auction. Furthermore, my corporate officers, who are members of my corporation's board at time of filing, shall be individually levied personal fines of 3x their individual annual personal income (consisting of, but not limited to: salary, bonuses, incentives, and all other forms of income), as calculated on the year this lawsuit was filed. My corporation furthermore cannot be sold, merged, transferred, or acquired by any other entity until the lawsuit is concluded, nor can board members be replaced except in the event of death or permanent incapacitation. My corporation furthermore cannot issue any further financial instruments during this time period, until the lawsuit is concluded (instruments include but are not limited to: stock issues, bond issues, or any other forms of publicly traded debt)."
That would simultaneously wipe out the RIAA, the MPAA, and damned near every real patent troll on the planet...
(PS: if you can improve on it or correct dumb mistakes that I was bound to include inadvertently, please, go for it).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
So the story says they sued Apple among others. Isn't one of the complaints that some people have against the iPhone that it Doesn't have removable storage? That would seem to exempt them from this patent.
Mike Scanlon
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.)
Isn't the standard procedure for a patent troll to pick the smallest infringing fish, go to court and hope to establish a precedent, THEN go for Sony, Apple, Sprint, etc?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I goggled the company that is the holder of the patent, apparently they also hold patents on Seat Belts and Air bags...... wtf!! http://www.gigatec.com/index.asp is the site that lists the other patents.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
The patent was originally filed on November 30, 2003. Can anyone say for sure there was prior art before this date?
:)
Here's an IT Week Review of the Treo 600 dated November 6, 2003.
It sounds like they read the review and worked up a patent for it over the Thanksgiving holiday.
How about a new standard for patents - that if a patent is filed when a practitioner of the art would ordinarily know the patent to be invalid, and the patent is not withdrawn between the time of filing and the time of issue, that it's a criminal offense?
This is getting out of hand - not the least of which that it's over 4 years since filing for this patent to issue because the system is all gummed up with bogus patents.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
An even more blatant example: Intellectual Weapons.
(They buy vulnerabilities from security researchers, and then they try to patent all possible security fixes)
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.
It looks to me like the '97 patent actually might have some merit. The continuations area pain/annoyance, but it seems like either way, this guy might be owed some money.
The one thing that annoys me about this is I remember seeing promotional videos for PCS when the technology first came out (prior to '97) which suggested that some day basically everything covered in this patent would happen. At some point we just need to recognize that some things are just an inevitable result of progress, rather than innovations in their own light?
sigs are a waste of space
I'd just look for a patent clerk driving a Lamborghini. Why look to stupidity when we have other equally icky human motivations for this?
I'm serious.
This almost has to be the work of bribery. How the hell could anyone not know that people have been putting video on cellphones already? How could you possibly claim that you haven't seen this before? Either it's bribery, or there's a patent clerk out there somewhere who doesn't own a TV and is communicating solely by carrier pigeon.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
IAPE (I am a patent examiner). I can not discuss the merits of this case, but I can lay out some of the requirements to receive a patent.
The specification is to be in enough detail that one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was made would possess sufficient knowledge to know how to make and use the invention based upon applicants disclosure. This does not mean that gate/circuit level designs are required, nor that enough detail must be present to enable a layman to make and use the invention or that the program code to implement the invention is required.
Examiners can do a 35 USC 101 rejection for enablement/best mode/in possession of the invention etc, if not enough detail is present to detail how to make/use the invention.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
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.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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
... I've been filing for continuation on a patent that was originally applied for in 1845. When I finally let rip, I'll begin suing people who make not just smartphones, but cellular phones, touch-tone phones, rotary phones, the estate of Alexander Graham Bell, and the guys who wrote the patent being talked about in this story.
Sincerely,
SCO
-Vendal Thornheart
A SIM card is removeable storage is it not? The amount of data it stores is small, but it stores data and is removeable.
The huge number of disjunctives in the claim (not allowed in UK patent applications, they'd need separate "main" claims to ensure clarity) make it hard to determine the true scope - as a UK application I'd say it lacks clarity.
... that's an awful narrow claim. My gut suggests that file wrapper estoppel will be involved somewhere, that the application slipped through based on some statement made about the invention that isn't explicit in the evidence we have here.
For example that end clause
Patent US7321783 claim 1 >>> "said display panel adapted for reproducing images or other data from at least one of said memory or the Internet, said other data including at least one of moving images, combined sounds and moving images, or music with or without images."
[see eg http://v3.espacenet.com/origdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=US2004110545&F=0&QPN=US2004110545%5D
Can be reduced as a display panel for playing music from a memory. How does a display panel play music? Perhaps this is a feature of recordation (Korean derivation?) devices!
You might also interpret the need for "connecting to [...] remotely located telephones" as being some sort of direct connection; this doesn't appear to be in the spec and so the claim would need clarifying to show this isn't the case.
However, looking at the HP OmniGo 700LX as a suggested citation - not withstanding the clarity issues - this is a palmtop for external attachment of a cellphone. The case in point is distinct in claiming "a cellphone provided in said housing" and in context and in light of teh description this appears to mean that it's a single integrated device and not an attachable unit.
Again wrt the OmniGo citation the claim 1 requires "at least one of (1) voice controlled dialing, (2) a wireless earphone or (3) a wire connection jack earphone with a microphone for operation of the mobile entertainment and communication device;" I don't think any of those 3 features is mentioned in that disclosure. Indeed the drafting "for operation of the mobile entertainment and communication device" suggests [I'd need to study the description in detail for this part] that the wireless-earphone or jack-wired-earphone-mic would have to be used to control ("for operation") the device.
Other devices like the Nokia 9210 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9210) didn't have wireless earphones nor jack-wired mics it appears. Indeed were there any phones with wireless earphones before bluetooth?
My brief look at the spec suggests they really thought the invention was the use of a memory card that you could download music from the 'net on to. But that's an instant opinion, similarly I only really looked at claim 1, other claims may be broader. Glancing at claim 10 (for example) I see it's drafted badly for the patent owner too
I'm just a failed UK patent examiner though so what would I know! - yeah I know I must be an idiots idiot, hey.
We should just get the patent office to read some of Tesla's work. This quote illustrates Tesla predicting smart phones more than 100 years ago: As soon as [the Wardenclyffe plant is] completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place... Nikola Tesla 1901
And here we see again what happens when laws are made by lawyers, for lawyers. Anyone who looks for the lawyers in shining armour who will knock these leeches into pulp come the next day fail to see the point. As far as the lawyers are concerned the law does fullfill its intended purpose by making society fully dependent on their 'services'. Kind of like the way rat catchers in days gone by might have spread rats through the city, thereby creating panic and calls for their service.
A politician who wrote a law which stated that from this point in time on anyone who wished to engage in economical activity could not do so until he paid due to his party would immediately be recognized for what she is. A lawyer writing a similar law telling the public to pay due to their caste is for some strange reason not recognized for what he is.
In many countries it is practice to have a civilian head the armed forces. This is supposed to ward off the danger of having those armed forces take over the government. A similar construction might help to avoid creating the current abysmal state of (parts of) the legal system which has turned into a sort of social security for the legal caste. Sure, lawyers will still be needed to work on the nitty-gritty details - like soldiers deployed on the battlefield. But in the same way as most societies do not tolerate those soldiers to impose a constant state of emergency and military rule those societies should not tolerate a constant state of legal emergency.
Laws should be written to benefit society as a whole. Not just to feed part of it.
--frank[at]unternet.org
I would like to see 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 file a class action law suit against the Patent Office for screwing up the market by not doing its job.
Not gonna happen, but it would rock...
)9TSS
This patent should have been dropped dead due to both prior art and obviousness. I just hope that the courts are going to dismiss the claims completely.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.