Patent Markings May Spell Trouble For Activision

eldavojohn writes "If you pick up your copy of Guitar Hero and read the literature, you'll notice it says 'patent pending' and cites a number of patents. A group alleges no such patent pends nor are some of the patents applicable. If a judge finds Activision guilty of misleading the public in this manner, they could become liable for up to $500 per product sold under false patent marking. The patents in question seem to be legitimately Guitar Hero-oriented, and little is to be found about the mysterious group. The final piece of the puzzle puts the filing in Texas Northern District Court, which might be close enough to Texas Eastern District Court to write this off as a new kind of 'false patent marking troll' targeting big fish with deep coffers."

Comments

Re:If they're trolls, so are the EFF

[IBBoard]

Neither did this group - they're filing in Northern Texas ;)

It's worse in germany

[s-whs]

This reminds me of the 'Abmanhnungen' in Germany. In both cases it's gaming the system and should be severely punished...

For many years in Germany attorneys have gamed the system, related to what you are allowed and not allowed to do esp. when selling something. These 'people' have for example scoured ebay ads, and when they found say a missing telephone number or missing note on how to undo the deal for a business seller, they sent such a 'Mahnung'. Not for free obviously, no, with an invoice for payment (for their own time/effort!). Yes, you will have to pay... It gets even worse. Suppose you've got an old magazine with old demo software disk on it and put it on ebay.de (as a German, I don't think you can be touched if not), then you'd better check there are no programs on there that are now forbidden. DVD copying software for example that circumvents the protection scheme is no longer allowed since several years.

People have been sent a 'Mahnung' for putting a mag with such no longer allowed software on ebay, and had to pay large amounts of money to such 'scammers'. You think you get a few euros, but you have to pay many hundreds. Nice.

These people are the worst kinds of assholes around just as the guy I mentioned in a previous posting, 'Pieter Lakeman' (who created a foundation supposedly to help clients of the DSB bank with supposedly bad loans, but in reality this foundation just pays his 300 euro/hour salary and there were hardly any bad loans anyway; He then influenced people to take away their money from DSB which led to its collapse. Nice!), and I consider them to be legal scammers.

See for one notorious guy, who was sentenced to jail for other things, this page (it didn't end well for him and I don't think many people will give a damn, he was really hated as one can see in many forums...): http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Freiherr_von_Gravenreuth

Re:Going after Activision in order to go after Kon

[DavidTC]

Okay, to recap what is actually happening for insane people who have no reading comprehension: No one is going after any patents whatsoever.

Some extraneous 'patent pending' numbers were printed on software boxes. No one has even slightly indicated that anyone would attempt to 'enforce' said patent-printing mistakes, or that other people wish to use said patents on their software, because the patents do not even relate to software.

Again: There are no actual patents involved at all. The 'offense' was a box that asserted that various pending patents applied to it, when they clearly do not, and no one is even slightly asserting they do. No one is attempting to enforce any patents, no one is attempting to strike down any patents. The patents mentioned will remain valid (For the things they actually apply to) even if this suit succeeds.

Apparently, falsely claiming you have a patent pending is a civil liability, as is claiming a pending patent applies to something it doesn't, and groups have arisen to run around suing people for this. This is the story of one of those groups.