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Google Takes a Small Step in Lodsys Patent-Troll Case
The Lodsys saga continues; reader WyzrdX writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Google has intervened in an ongoing intellectual property dispute between smartphone application developers and a patent-holding firm, Wired.com has learned, marking the Mountain View company's first public move to defend Android coders from a patent troll lawsuit that's cast a pall on the community. The company says it filed a request with the United States Patent and Trademark office Friday for reexamination of two patents asserted by East Texas-based patent firm Lodsys. Google's request calls for the USPTO to assess whether or not the patents' claims are valid."
This after Google themself take a broad patent like this?
Patents are a bad idea and everyone is just getting them to sue other companies.
Google+ vs. Facebook, and why Google+ will fail
I think the next version of Android ... Ice Cream Sandwich is going to be fully vetted for patent claims.
That's their strategy .. I think. So far, all the patent claims against Google that I have seen have simple workarounds -- so it's logical that Google is stripping it all out of Ice Cream Sandwich.
The Lodsys patent workaround is a pain in the ass.. not to mention totally bogus .. so they need to invalidate it.
Nobody has patents on the fundamental technologies which were developed in academia and not patented (for example pinch to zoom or touchscreen scrolling/panning or zoomable UIs).
Other than with the expected value of a patent monopoly, how will the maker of a new drug finance FDA-mandated clinical trials? Show a viable alternative to patents for industries that are as heavily regulated for product safety and truth in advertising as the drug industry, and the case against patents will become clearer.
I welcome the fact that Google finally does at least something (after months of not answering related questions from affected Android app developers), and Google did a very good job so far on patent reexaminations in its dispute with Oracle.
However, these reexamination requests are of very limited use on their own . They don't change the situation of developers who get letters from Lodsys or are actually sued by Lodsys and have to decide whether to pay up or fight. Even the combination of Apple's motion for a narrowly-focused intervention (Apple just raises contractual issues as opposed to defending app developers against Lodsys's infringement assertions per se; Apple's 'exhaustion' theory could work but it's far from certain to hold water) and Google's reexamination requests doesn't really strengthen little 'indie' app developers at this stage. Also, the Wired article pointed out that the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas grants stays pending reexaminations only in 20% of all cases. Most of the time, those federal lawsuits continue unabatedly, even though the patent may subsequently be invalidated.
Short of blanket coverage from Apple and Google, what those two platform companies do against Lodsys is insufficient. It would be great if they could give their developers some real guidance -- many right now don't even dare to implement in-app purchasing or links to an app store (Lodsys also brings assertions against links, not just in-app purchasing) because they don't want to take risks. Others have removed their apps from the U.S. market because of Lodsys (which goes after international developers, too, but can only sue them if those do business in the U.S.). Apple and Google fail to create a basis on which developers would be able to simply ignore Lodsys and go about their business.
Apple's intervention claim is actually quite strong. They say we have a license to the patent, and the license terms mean that all developers can make use of our software implementing the patent on iOS without needing a license. If that argument flies, and it has a very good chance in my opinion, they can get rid of Lodsys at very low cost. All the judge has to do is check the license terms, which judges are much better at than checking patents. It does mean, however, that Apple doesn't help Android developers at all (but then there is no reason for Apple to help Android developers).
Google's intervention very nicely attacks at a different angle. So there may be twice the cost for Lodsys, who has plenty of work anyway with half a dozen cases against it for declaratory judgements.
If things were as easy as you (gnasher719) say, it would certainly be just a matter of contract interpretation. But it's not. You wrote your post prior to reading my explanation of why it's far from easy to argue with the existing license agreement. I linked to that explanation before.
Apple (and Google and others) got a license to Lodsys's patents not from Lodsys itself but from Intellectual Ventures, along with roughly 30,000 other Intellectual Ventures patents. It's highly unlikely that Intellectual Ventures' standard patent licensing agreement says anything about 'app developers'. Chances are 99.99% that the term 'app developers' doesn't appear in that license agreement at all.
The analysis of whether or not Apple's license constitutes 'exhaustion' of any given Lodsys patent is no less complicated than analyzing Lodsys's infringement assertions. As I explained on my blog, 'exhaustion' is a concept that requires an in-depth technical analysis of the technology that is licensed (in this case, Apple's technology) and the one that is accused of infringement (the apps) and, very importantly, how those two layers interact. This means that the court has to go through a detailed technical analysis based on so-called infringement claim charts, which typically require the construction (interpretation) of the most relevant terms used in the language of those patents.
What I just said is also supported in full by Apple's own arguments to the court for why its intervention should be admitted (Apple stresses that only Apple itself can explain how its technology works) and a letter sent to the court by Atari, Electronic Arts, Quickoffice and Square-Enix in support of Apple's proposed intervention. Those four companies also stress the importance of access to Apple's information not only regarding the license agreement but also the technology at issue.
Exhaustion defenses are very difficult to analyze. Do some research on the case law and you'll see that those mattesr are by no means less difficult to analyze than infringement assertions.
As it has been shown, Lodsys is owned and operated by a single person and that person lives and resides in Wisconsin. You can make claims of being based in east Texas all day long, but when it comes down do where the one person behind all of this lives, you have to go to Wisconsin to find him.
I'm not saying anyone should actually pay this asshole a visit, but I would love to see him get interviewed by someone in a bonafide news organization to answer some really tough questions.
This guy is the poster-child for patent trolls and needs some strong discouragement. That discouragement, however, needs to be official as anything personal to him would only discourage him and I'd rather see all of these jokers go away.
The patent system is broken. Lodsys however can not be held accountable for that.
Big companies sueing the snot out of each other with patents: accepted.
Big companies sueing the snot out of smaller companies treading on their lawn: accepted.
Small companies sueing big companies: surely, now we have a problem?
Sure, it's the business model of Lodsys to hoard patents and sue. But the regulatory framework around patents facilitated its business model. Lodsys plays by the rules. The only really significant difference being, this time around it's a small company sueing the big boys and now suddenly there is a problem.
Lodsys nicely shows the brokenness of the patent system. We should be more thankful.
My karma ran over your dogma
One way to solve the problem with "Intellectual Property" is to treat exactly what it wants to call itself - Property.
In my state, "Property" (like my house) is taxed up the wazoo. Why not do the same for "Intellectual Property", so that these trolls with multibillion dollar "portfolios of intellectual property" are TAXED at the same rate my house is taxed.
I suspect those wonderful Intellectual "Property" portfolios of Lodsys, Microsoft, Apple, Merge Healthcare, among others, would suddenly become worth very little - lest they be taxed.
You attack all sorts of other points that I'm not interested in discussing with you. The topic here was what Apple's proposed defense against Lodsys is. That one is available on Scribd as a PDF document for everyone to read, and it raises only one defense: exhaustion. Here's the Scribd link. Compare the substance of that document to your off-base claim that Apple raised exhaustion only as a reason for an intervention without limiting its defenses to that one.
At least Google is doing the smart thing and requesting reexamination of the supposedly-infringed patents. Requesting re-examination is one of the best first steps in countering patent infringement suits by patent trolls.