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Small Devs Attacked Over In-App Purchase Button Patent
Thornburg writes with this excerpt from a story at MacRumors:
"Yesterday, we received word from Rob Gloess of Computer LogicX ... that he had received legal documents threatening a patent lawsuit over the use of an 'upgrade' button in the lite version of his application linking users to the App Store where they could purchase the full version. 'Our app, Mix & Mash, has the common model of a limited free, lite, version and a full version that contains all the features. We were told that the button that users click on to upgrade the app, or rather link to the full version on the app store was in breach of US patent no 7222078. We couldn't believe it, the upgrade button!?!' The patent in question was filed in December 2003 as part of series of continuations on earlier patent applications dating back to 1992. The patent is credited to Dan Abelow, who sold his extensive portfolio of patents to holding firm Lodsys in 2004. Lodsys is indeed the company issuing the threats of a lawsuit regarding the patent in question."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Perhaps it's just best to do your technology outside of the USA and leave it to devour itself.
The claimant is in violation of my patent and owes me license fees.
In the amount of (holds pinkie to side of mouth) one million dollars (evil laugh) ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Hey Microsoft, how's that Upgrade Anytime feature of Windows 7 looking right now? Like a big fat target? This case is to set a legal precident -- if you're smart, you'll help this guy now, before it becomes a multi-million dollar cock-up.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Appropriately enough, when you search for Lodsys in wikipedia. It says.... "Did you mean: lousy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=lodsys&sourceid=Mozilla-search
Need any dad jokes?
Take a look at their patent portfolio:
- provide online help, customer support, and tutorials
- conduct online subscription renewals
- provide for online purchasing of consumable supplies
survey users for their impressions of their products and services
- assist customers to customize their products and services
display interactive online advertisements
- collect information on how users actually use their products and services
- sell upgrades or complimentary products
- maintain products by providing users notice of available updates and assisting in the installation of those updates.
Why do they call things "inventions"? What about prior art? What about obviousness? Methinks there should be a law against ridiculous and/or frivolous patents.
The problem is that the patent could be absolutely baseless, but it takes money to go to court over patent cases, especially when the plaintiff has the home field advantage in choosing the court to try the case in, what judge hears it (if you don't think a good patent lawyer knows which judges rotate to what cases, think again), and when it appears on the docket (it can always be stalled), most small developers will just settle.
These are just tactics that do work almost always taken from the RIAA playbook. I'm amazed that lawyers have not been doing this sooner.
had a solution to "insurgent tax collectors and parasites".
Check "The Ultimate Sniper".
Soap and ballot boxes didn't avail. The slimebags will never stop till there is a penalty. Either suck it up or do something, all the whining hasn't accomplished anything.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
This is why we need Libertarians to control Congress and the White House so they will get rid of government (especially Federal government) supporting this kind of theft, and promote a fully Free Enterprise system where anyone can invent whatever they want and not worry about the government stealing it. Ron Paul officially announced his candidacy for President today. Let's find out if he is a true Libertarian or just some two-faced Republican and get him to take a side.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
According to this page the company is suing HP, Lexmark, Samsung, Hulu, Trend Micro, Canon, Lenovo and others over the same patent (amongst others).
I'd say big companies might just be involved already.
Or perhaps we ought to have a time out one patents, if they can't get their application through in a reasonable amount of time, then it gets denied. I find it hard to believe that something "invented" in 1992 really would take 12 years to go through the patent process without making some pretty ham fisted mistakes.
It's almost as if they were wanting to give time for others to implement the patented idea in order to sue even more people than would otherwise be possible.
You're a small company, they're a large company. They have powerful lawyers, you don't.
They can pretty much sue you for anything, no matter how stupid and baseless it is.
Sorry, this is the stupid way software patents are.
I think that governments should be lobbied to enact patent reform to require patent holders to actively use and promote the patented technology within some timeframe of the patent being granted in order to continue to have patent protection. My reasoning is this: If a patent is so intrinsically valuable to you that it was worth filing the patent in the first place, then you must capitalize on it to be able to protect it. If you can't get funding or sell licenses to get a product to market within a reasonable amount of time, you lose the right to get the courts to do that for you. Seeing as most things truly deserving of patent protection are put in use and on sale while the patent is still pending or not yet filed, I don't think this would harm the kinds of industries that patents were designed to work for, while patent holding companies and trolls would be under the requirement to actually do something with their portfolio instead of waiting for someone else to do the hard work and then forcing them to pay through the courts. A side effect of this is that pharmaceuticals companies that decide a medicine is not worth selling and shut it down would also lose protection.
The core of the idea is to recognize that the ideas embodied by patents have no value unless someone is using them - 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. If you have the idea, and develop far enough to patent it, you can get some time protection to get it into production, but there needs to be a limit to how long you get protection without making reasonable efforts.
More Caffeine. NOW
The comments on these topics always suffer from Slashdot Oversimplification Syndrome.
Definitely a riot to read. Thanks guys! Keep up the... work.
The proper solution to this kind of stuff is similar to the concept of rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
This only works against actual human beings.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Apparently, the particular patent involved in this case was originally filed in 1992, and then got a long series of "continuations".
Now, I haven't gone and looked at it, but I rather doubt that the patent filed in 1992, before what we know as the Internet existed, bore much resemblance to what is being claimed today...but that's the patent system for you. Anything that was created after the original filing date cannot count as prior art, so they can claim they thought of it all, even if they added various claims a decade later based on stuff they saw people already doing, by more "continuations."
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Honestly?
Another reason to love capitalism; you think of gravity, the universe is your's!
Patents aren't capitalism. In fact they're almost the exact opposite of capitalism: they are government-granted monopolies on production. They were originally granted to protect individual innovators from exploitation by wealthy corporations, but almost since the laws were first passed they were used for the exact opposite purpose. They need to die, or at least be seriously reformed, but in the current pro-corporate, anti-consumer climate of, well both parties but I'm thinking of one in particular we'll never see real patent reform, just like how real health care reform and real banking reform were "compromised" to death, and even their hollowed-out husks are drawing fire from the radical right.
IANAPL, but the 74 claims of the patent seem to cover any sort of user feed-back, interaction and results display. I suspect that the /. "Reply to This" link, "Post a Comment" button and probably the entire /. site are in violation as well. Yes, the claims are that broad and numerous.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'd say they are absolutely tied to capitalism in that they are about ownership. There is no way to own the idea of an upgrade button the way you can own a mine, so the government created a fiction that lets corporations treat them the same way.
Right. It's a government subsidy, basically. Of course, so is all property ownership--without government intervention, the only thing stopping someone from moving into your house while you're away on vacation is the security guards you hire.
Remember how Patents and Copyrights were established to encourage innovation? Ha!
I would argue that they have encouraged innovation. Look at all the innovative ways they've managed to turn the U.S. legal system into a huge MUD with lots of gold pharmers, or how many different ways they've found to transform lawyers into bedbugs and cockroaches without infringing bio-tech patents..
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Sort of. If you publish your invention publicly, the subsequent patent becomes unenforceable upon allocation. In fact, just talking about a patent application to a large enough group will make the subsequent patent unenforceable. Sometiems, even a vague mention of a similar idea can invalidate a patent. I remember a case well where we won against a competitor who posted their cool new process on their website. Whoops...
The idea behind submarine patents was to use your secret squirrel ideas unpatented for as long as possible. The minute you think someone is going to figure out your 'method', you suddenly work out all the bugs in your application and, viola, the lab that was about to RE your invention suddenly finds you have a totally novel, and enforceable, patent. In short, if you can keep the method of making some super cool invention a secret for a long time (difficult to RE or whatever) you can effectively extend your patent by the number of years you've keep it secret. This might have been used extensively by modern pharma to great sucess, but submarine patents around the world are largely defunct nowadays.
RE: The OT. My rule of thumb is thus - any patent with more than a couple pages, or more than a hand full of "real" claims, is totally worthless. I'm all for patent reform in this regard, as nobody should be allowed to patent a software process that simply calls an apple and orange, such as patent 7222078. Sadly, it really seems like the inmates are running the asylum here. Just me 2.5 cents, I have no idea how the software industry works in regards to patents and IP. I wish the 'victims' all the luck in the world defending thus. Here's hoping they all team up, but I'm willing to bet the big guys want to go it alone less they risk a terrible loss and chance of appeal. Our system at its best :(
We are fortunate that patents are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. Imagine if the wheel, books, or fire had been patented.
Proverbs 21:19
Exactly. If litigated, this case would probably wind up with a summary judgment of non-infringement after the claim construction hearing (that's where the court ascribes meaning to each term in the claim and thereby figures out what the actual scope of the claim is). But just getting to that point is extremely expensive, far more expensive than any small-time software developer could deal with.
On the other hand, as long as these guys haven't been sued yet, they can file first for declaratory judgment, and thereby pick their venue. Since they're actually a UK-based company, though, I'm not sure this helps.