Slashdot Mirror
Acacia Sues Amazon Over Kindle Fire
walterbyrd writes "A company called Smartphone Technologies filed the suit last Friday in Texas Eastern District Court accusing the Kindle Fire tablet of violating four of its patents. Smartphone Technologies is owned by Acacia Research, a firm that buys and licenses patents and is seen by many as a patent troll. 'One patent cited in the suit, U.S. Patent No. 6,956,562, simply refers to a method for using a touch screen to enter commands on a handheld computer. Another patent in question relates to a method for storing calendars on a PDA and was initially issued to Palm in 2002.'"
A PDA is just a weak computer in a small form factor, so why did palm even get it in 2002 when a calender on a computer was decades old before then?
Patents are worthless, and are choking what little creativity is left in our country.
Amazon has the resources to go after these guys, to remove them from the gene pool. But will they bother?
(Seeing how tenaciously they hold on to the One-Click patent I somehow doubt it, but it would be nice.)
Evil bastards sue evil bastards. News at 11.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Slashdot these days is little more than lawsuits, settlements and the ongoings of such. This is what our industry has turned into huh? Sad.
Without them taking companies to court over issues that should never have been patentable in the first place, no one would realize or believe just how seriously screwed up the patent system is.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Obviously most American innovation is concentrated in the judicial system rather than anything related to a free market.
It's looking like the patent courts - in a manner of speaking, as I suppose there is really no single "patent court" - like the courts are becoming a sort of platform for marketing by obscure companies with uncertain patents on file - but not just any obscure companies, obscure companies with lawyers. Well, that's the judiciary's side of things to address.
In other words: Yawn. Next news item?
I think it's pretty much certain that if you've developed any useful technology since the dawn of software patents, you've accidentally stepped on at least a couple actionable patents, and you just have to hope that the patent holder either doesn't find out about it or doesn't extort you for too much of your revenues. Is there a name for this principle yet? I'd love to slap mine on it if there isn't...
I have been reading about these patent wars for ages now. Most peoples reaction seems to be to grumble but put up with it. Is there nothing can be done? Our leaders seem unable or not interested. This is killing innovation in the electronics industry. Soon we'll be left with just a few big fish controlling everything. Maybe its time for the revolution!
Why do you ask a question, then answer it yourself?
By definition a patent must be new, useful, and non-obvious. While the methods listed in the patents are useful, they are neither new, nor non-obvious. Either the USPTO employees are ill-educated on software methodologies, or just plain lazy.
I agree that the whole of civilization has been built by minor improvements. So, why should we slow that process down with software patents?
"One patent cited in the suit, U.S. Patent No. 6,956,562, simply refers to a method for using a touch screen to enter commands on a handheld computer."
Go read it, it is essentially a "stylus-free" input method on a tablet, i.e. fingers. I guess you could use your wang or toes if you wanted to, though, since it does not explicitly say "fingers," just non-stylus. (Though I would love to see someone write up a patent for "dong-centered system input.")
Oh, yeah, patent troll, blah blah.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
It's looking like the patent courts - in a manner of speaking, as I suppose there is really no single "patent court" - like the courts are becoming a sort of platform for marketing by obscure companies with uncertain patents on file - but not just any obscure companies, obscure companies with lawyers.
Specifically, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas became nothing but a "platform for ... obscure companies with lawyers" some time ago. There seems to be something particularly toxic about this particular court's combination of judges, jury pools, and court rules that attracts this type of activity.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
has anyone else noticed almost every patent suit is filed in Eastern Texas? it's like there is something pulling them there. very strange indeed.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/09/21/riddle-me-this-do-patent-trolls-create-wealth-or-d.aspx
Boston University study concludes that $88 billion has been wiped off the value of US companies by these trolls, raking in less than $8 billion in return, and since these trolls don't make things or really invent things, no manufacturing was made by them, and no scientists employed and no research done.
What the USPTO has done is a disaster for the USA, and the reforms don't fix anything.
The Eastern District of Texas doesn't have much hard crimes to fill the court with so the patent cases won't be stuck in the low priority queue for long. And with the amount of patent cases, they have built a lot of experience now so the trials will flow thru even quicker.
Correct. Even more ironic, is the reasoning behind Xerox losing a summary judgement to palmOne.
The reason was prior art. The two pieces of prior art were from 1983 and 1985.
So, at the time, palmOne said the software wasn't patentable due to prior art. Now they want to patent it themselves. Oh sweet irony.
It's looking like the patent courts - in a manner of speaking, as I suppose there is really no single "patent court" - like the courts are becoming a sort of platform for marketing by obscure companies with uncertain patents on file - but not just any obscure companies, obscure companies with lawyers.
Specifically, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas became nothing but a "platform for ... obscure companies with lawyers" some time ago. There seems to be something particularly toxic about this particular court's combination of judges, jury pools, and court rules that attracts this type of activity.
Refer to the This American Life show "When Patents Attack" to find out that you're not 100% correct here. The show is a very useful intro to the topic.
Patent trolls are not innovation in any sense of the word other than possibly being a legal way to practice extortion.
My understanding is that they are overworked. There are too many patent applications to spend even ten minutes reviewing each one
I'm wondering if they have a must-approve-rate or if we should equip slashdotters with a red DENIED stamp and send them of to work at the USPTO for free...
Apparently it was mostly procedural. It is a court where your patent case goes to trial in a timely manner.
See http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202518061641&Texas_Judge_Leaves_His_Patent_Rocket_Docket_to_Practice_Law
As much as I dislike patent trolls, it's really hard to feel sorry for Amazon in this one. They are the ones who patented one-click-purchase, after all. What goes around comes around.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Oh, yea.
"53. The handheld computer of claim 47, wherein the particular action corresponds to transmitting data by generating a signal emanating from a radiation emitter.
54. The handheld computer of claim 53, wherein the radiation emitter is an optical radiation emitter.
55. The handheld computer of claim 53, wherein the radiation emitter is a radio frequency radiation emitter.
56. The handheld computer of claim 53, wherein the radiation emitter is an microwave radiation emitter.
57. The handheld computer of claim 56, wherein the radiation emitter is coupled to a telephone network.
58. The handheld computer of claim 56, wherein the radiation emitter is coupled to a computer network.
59. The handheld computer of claim 53, wherein the radiation emitter is coupled to a computer network.
60. The handheld computer of claim 53, wherein the radiation emitter is coupled to a telephone network. "
Can't someone tell those million monkeys with the million typewriters to stop with patents and start with Shakespeare?
"...rubber-stamp the rest".
Oh I know this one!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P46qYCIt954
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
the kindle fire isn't even out yet. how do they know how amazon implemented anything?
If this goes through and hopefully it does this will mark the end of the evil fucks at Amafuck. Amafuck, like Crapple with their ifuck shit and Fuckle with their assdroid platform and crappy search engine should be eliminated from lawsuits for the shit they pulled. Once the popular toys disappear the sheeple will finally see how evil patents are. At that point they will see just how evil capitalism really is once they have lost their money to imaginary property. That is when the sheeple will wake up and want communism, the only truly workable economic system designed for the people rather than the greedy rich.
COMMUNISM FTW, CAPITALISM NEEDS TO BE FUCKING DESTROYED!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm gonna patent "Doing something to affect something".
I'm gonna be soooo rich!
~Syberz
So upon reading the headline, I thought Amazon was being sued because some kindles burst into flames in a warehouse or something.
Apparently you can't always get what you want!
I still don't understand why the litigants get to choose their venue, especially if the plaintiffs are not headquartered there.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
This situation strikes me as very similar to what happens in financial markets. The whole industry is not creating any value, since they primary occupation is buying paper and then selling it at a higher price. Some may argues, that the traders add efficiency and liquidity to company price formation. Can we apply the same argument to patent trolls?
the patent laws. If "storing a calendar on a PDA device" is patentable, then I don't care what Good Things (tm) patents bring to the table, the current patent system has to be sent to /dev/null.
If Acacia isn't presently selling actual products with their patented technology then they have no real loses and deserve to lose those patents -- in a sane society, at least.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I wasn't trolling, but I think I just got owned.
I was looking at the date that the calendar patent was granted, 2002, instead of the date filed, 1999. Also, the two pieces of prior art I referenced did not include multiple strokes. The first had the action registered upon pen lift, the second defined the action as a single stroke curve. It looks like you were right after all.
I still don't like software patents, but that's completely irrelevant.