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Twitter Faces Patent Infringement Lawsuit
Digital Dan writes "Twitter is being sued for patent infringement. Surprised? OK, probably not, but you'd think the plaintiff would at least wait for Twitter to actually make money before striking. According to TechCrunch: 'Twitter is being sued ... by TechRadium, a Texas-based technology company which makes mass notification systems for public safety organizations, the military, and utilities.' The abstract to patent #7130389 describes it: 'A digital notification and response system utilizes an administrator interface to transmit a message from an administrator to a user contact device. The system comprises a dynamic information database that includes user contact data, priority information, and response data. The administrator initiates distribution of the message based upon grouping information, priority information, and the priority order.' Two other patents are involved as well."
think there is bound to be a bit of prior art here... like the teletext, sms, wordprocessors and even digital radiotransmissions. Who grants this stuf anyway?
A Texas based patent lawsuit that doesn't, at first blush, appear to be a patent troll.
TechRadium actually has a website (http://www.techradium.com/) and appears to sell products.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Maybe they can use net send to communicate the failure of their suit.....
As far as I can tell, email distribution lists and automated rules for re-sending email after receiving them from an email list is also covered under the claims in this patent. How did the patent examiners fail to see this?
-- John
I acknowledge that at least the suing company is in the market of actually selling something to 911's, EMS's and the like, and the increasing use of twitter for "Follow me for important safety updates" is probably cutting into their business...dramatically....but...I don't think this lawsuit deserves legs.
The problem with patents is that one can sit in a dark room and dream up every conceivable thing that may plausibly be invented, patent it and then sit back and either watch the cash roll in for doing bugger all ... or the whole of human development has to wait for your patent to expire.
I am sick of it. We should scrap patents completely. If you have got a secret way of doing something, then it is up to you to exploit it and keep it secret. If somebody else discovers, either independently or through espionage, what you are doing, and they can do it better, cheaper, then you are fair game.
SIMPLE + NO LEGAL TEAM FEES!!!
E.g. India etc.. should be flooding our markets with what at the moment would be called "stolen drug technologies", but are in fact just reverse engineered. I don't care if the big biotechs bitch that without patenting it would not be worth their while investing in R&D - they should invest in R&D to keep their stuff secret if it concerns them that much, or better still, be more efficient on the production line.
@TechRadium, your #lawsuit is #bullshit.
...is it just me or does the concept of "mass notification systems that allow a group administrator or 'message Author' to originate a single message that will be delivered simultaneously via multiple communication gateways to members of a group of 'message Subscribers'" encompass things such as newspapers and cable TV?
Yes, it does encompass those things, IMO.
It does not I believe, include Twitter.
Why?
Because Twitter (1) does not use an administrator to originate a message, and (2) doesn't "deliver" a message. It posts a message, where it must then be retrieved. Push vs. pull. Big difference.
When you're not looking, this sig is in Latin.
Fuck, it sounds like the text messaging on frickin' cell phone.
Message/alert systems have been around for decades. I remember working on a Xenix box with a half a dozen dumb terminals attached and we could zap messages back and forth.
When will everyone come to their senses and start making fraudulent patent applications criminal offenses with crippling fines and jail time?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Because Twitter (1) does not use an administrator to originate a message, and (2) doesn't "deliver" a message. It posts a message, where it must then be retrieved. Push vs. pull. Big difference.
"Administrator" could just mean anyone who has followers, not necessarily somebody whom the site design allows or encourages to have more followers than others.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Because Twitter [...] posts a message, where it must then be retrieved. Push vs. pull. Big difference.
I thought the whole "big thing" about Twitter is that it can send SMS messages to subscriber's phones? That's "push" pretty much by definition, isn't it?
So what year was wall created?
Not only do the tax payers have to fund the USPTO and all of its horrible miserableness, but we also have to fund all the fucking terrible trials that inevitably pop up from their failings.
One convenient locations...in Africa.
Here's the second clue: the patent has one independent claim (claim 1), and all other claims are specificly narrowed cases of claim 1. Here's claim 1:
1. A digital notification and response system, comprising:
a. an administrator interface for preparing and transmitting a message from an administrator to at least one user contact device;
b. a dynamic information database for storing the message, wherein the dynamic information database comprises;
i. user contact data comprising:
1. user contact device information; and
2. user selected priority information that indicates a contact order for the user contact device;
ii. user selected grouping information comprising:
1. at least one group associated with each user contact device; and
2. a priority order for contacting each user contact device within the group;
iii. response data comprising:
1. user response information that indicates individual user contact devices have received the message; and
2. response information that indicates when insufficient user contact device information exists to contact the user contact devices;
wherein the administrator initiates distribution of the message using the grouping information, priority information, and the priority order, and wherein the message is transmitted through at least two industry standard gateways simultaneously, wherein the two industry standard gateways are selected from the group consisting of: a SMTP gateway a SIP, an H.323, an ISDN gateway, a PSTN gateway, a softswitch, and combinations thereof, wherein the message is received by the at least one user contact device, and the at least one user contact device transmits a response through the industry standard gateways to the dynamic information database.
Now, to interpret the meaning of the claims, it is necessary to read the specification, to see if the terms used have special definitions. Studying the exemplary embodiments described in the specification may also be informative (or not, depending).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I am the administrator of my twitter account. The message is delivered when the client retrieves it. Okay, not really, I don't use twitter, but everyone who posts is effectively the administrator of their own account.
The push vs pull argument is retarded as in almost every case with just a slightly different point of view you can make it appear the exact opposite. In a TCP connection, which side is pushing and which side is pulling? The initiator or the listener? Hmm? Depends on which level you're looking at it and which why you'd like for it to appear. If you look at it at the high level with common sense, its clear, but if you really muck about and throw some one who argues like a lawyer at it, the lines get blurry real quick.
Either way, if you read the patent, push vs pull doesn't matter the way its written, only that it makes it to a client.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I personally maintained a system that went into production in 1968 which had twitter like features.
A message was limited to an 80 character TTY line.
The first five characters were addressing information, a space and the rest free form text.
Carriage return dispatched the message which was spooled to drum then picked up and distributed to a single entity or a group (depending upon the first five characters as I mentioned).
So, ya. I think there is prior art.
... the official newsite for ridiculous lawsuits?
Student Sues cause she's unemployable
Student Sues amazon
Touchpad patent holder sues everybody
Family Sues Genie
Wells Fargo Sues Itself
Rosetta Stone Sues Google
City Sues Man for rotting meat
Keep in mind those stories were all in the last 30 days!
"
You are contradicting yourself. You state the claim as "a database hooked to a bunch of different communication devices that can be rigged for group broadcasting". But then you claim that an example of 1 means of group broadcasting "Broadcast fax" is sufficient to serve as prior art for the whole claim.
It would have been more accurate to say "as a general concept can we say "broadcast fax that, if it gets a busy signal, calls one persons cell phone, another person's pager, another persons email; and then if they don't work calls the first person's email, the next person's home phone, the third persons wife's cell phone..." - oh, wait - that didn't exist before. Hmmmm..."
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Finally, someone who understands that the abstract is meaningless. The claim is what matters here.
And speaking of the claim. 1.i.2.: "user selected priority information that indicates a contact order for the user contact device;" I am not aware of Twitter allowing a user to prioritize contact order.
And 1.iii.1.: "user response information that indicates individual user contact devices have received the message;" Again, I am not aware of Twitter doing this. Perhaps for ad tracking purposes, but otherwise there is no indication that this occurs at all.
Thus, I would go so far as to say that there is no infringement here - aka nothing to see, move along.
The patent appears to be specific as to purpose and how it would work. So specific, in fact, that Twitter doesn't intrude at all. In order to make Twitter fit so as to be intruding into their patents, you have to broaden the application of the idea so that the technical implementation is no longer important.
Upon broadening the interpretation, a lot of prior art clouds the validity of TechRadium's patents (e.g. using a megaphone to shout at a large crowd is technically a "message sender" sending out one message to a whole lot of "message receivers" who "subscribed" to listen to the message (by showing up at the event) -- so apparently the idea itself isn't really new.
It doesn't stop there.
You may think the megaphone is a silly comparison or clumsy implementation of it... the point is the idea is not new, nor did TechRadium invent it. So what did they invent? Further delve in with some of the things that make their message broadcast system more elegant (yes, well we added this nifty little database so we can manage a publish/scriber model that's a managed and able to be quite a bit more selective than using a megaphone to shout at a crowd), then there's lots of prior art to show that the concept of the pub/sub model in IT predates their oldest patent by many years. The reason the concept was coined the "pub/sub" model is because it worked just like a newspaper or magazine that publishes content and subscribers (a.k.a. customers or readers) could choose to subscribe and, in the case of a publisher with different kinds of magazines, they could even decide which magazines they want to receive. They would of course use some sort of record keeping system so as not confuse what each subscriber wanted to receive. So apparently that idea isn't new either.
Essentially what Twitter "copies" is all the same stuff TechRadium had to also copy in order to come up with their implementation. This is mildly reminiscent of Apple's lawsuit against Microsoft back in the mid 80's when they claimed MS used their desktop GUI idea -- then it turned out BOTH of them got the idea from Xerox. Twitter's implementation would be (a) different and (b) probably a lot more scalable. Twitter has to handle millions of subscribers... TechRadium's solution probably only has to handle a few hundred and *maybe* a couple thousand.... tops. In order to achieve these differences in scale, the implementation is likely to be radically different.
This means I can no longer email my employees and contractors about work from my administrative account and have to erase my administrative address book. I also have to return all the company pagers!. Well returning the pagers might actually save me some bucks.
Wow! How did this ever get approved as a patent? Talk about obviousness.
I have prior art for this, but unfortunately, I wrote it and it's never been published. This was a work for hire. I wrote a mainframe program that used a central database to send out emails and pages to various people. Some people only got emails some got pages and emails. The program included a severity code to determine if only an email was sent or if a page was also required. I wrote this before 1997. I may still have all the pieces, but it requires: a Unisys mainframe, A Unisys print manager, a PC with ProComm installed, a mail server, a phone line, and pagers/cell phones..