Bittorrent and uTorrent Sued For Patent Violations

dutchwhizzman writes "Bittorrent and uTorrent have been sued for using certain techniques in their clients and the bittorrent protocol. From the article it appears technologies are being used that were submitted in a 1999 patent that was subsequently approved in 2007. This itself is not uncommon, but given the technologies involved, HTTP could very well be prior art, or it could violate at least part of the same protocol."

Comments

It is legally impossible ...

[Compulawyer]

... to infringe ("violate") *part* of a patent claim. Each claim at the end of a patent is separate. You either do everything one of the claims describes or you are missing something. If you do everything, you infringe the claim. If you are missing even one piece, you do not infringe.

HTTP may be prior art, but it is only *invalidating* prior art if it does everything that is described in the claims. New inventions necessarily build on old ones. There is nothing legally improper about claiming an invention that is based on something old. It is called an *improvement.*

The only one who created something from nothing was God. Everyone else has to work with what is already here.

Crazy Patent

[wrook]

This is even worse than the usual bad patents I've seen. They have 20 pages of a very detailed description of their "preferred configuration". However, they say that it shouldn't be taken as a literal description of the system and that their patent is intended to be very broad. The claims are ridiculously broad and don't even reference the description of the system (apparently they were serious when they said that the description wasn't intended to be illustrative of their claims). The claims don't even make up half a page of text.

Look, I don't know much about patents, but surely there's no way such a bad patent can stand up in court... Can it?

Re:Crazy Patent

[Theaetetus]

This is even worse than the usual bad patents I've seen. They have 20 pages of a very detailed description of their "preferred configuration". However, they say that it shouldn't be taken as a literal description of the system and that their patent is intended to be very broad. The claims are ridiculously broad and don't even reference the description of the system (apparently they were serious when they said that the description wasn't intended to be illustrative of their claims). The claims don't even make up half a page of text.

Look, I don't know much about patents, but surely there's no way such a bad patent can stand up in court... Can it?

Yes, with all due respect, you don't know much about patents. This patent is actually pretty decent. The detailed description is quite detailed, sufficient to enable one of skill in the art to make and use the claimed invention. The boilerplate line about "shouldn't be taken as a literal description" simply says that when they talk about, for example, removable media that could be an Iomega Jazz Disk, a memory disk, hard drive, etc., that it could also include thumb drives, flash memory, a CD, etc. Not a real concern.

That the claims "don't even reference the description" is also not important. I'm not sure what you expect the claims to look like, but if you were thinking they'd say "a media server, such as the ones described above in cols. 5-7," then, no. This is what they look like - a numbered series of single-sentence claims reciting one or more limitations, defining the bounds of the patented material.

Now, if you've only ever looked at patents from the 1800s, you might have expected to see an omnibus claim instead, such as "I claim the invention as described above." But those aren't legally valid anymore.

Re:Why is this still news?

[Luckyo]

"In two-three countries, software patents are accepted". Everywhere else, they're not.

Specifically USA, South Korea and partially Japan. That's it.