Honeywell Vs Nest: When the Establishment Sues Silicon Valley

An anonymous reader writes with this quote from an article at TechCrunch: "Honeywell filed a multi-patent infringement lawsuit against Nest Labs and Best Buy yesterday. The suit alleges that Nest Labs is infringing on seven Honeywell patents. Honeywell is not seeking licensing fees. The consumer electronic conglomerate wants Nest Labs to cease using the technology and is actually looking to collect damages caused by the infringement. Damages? Bull****. This is about killing the competition."

Comments

Really?

[HexaByte]

Patent hold get to license the technology or not, based upon their own preferences. You can't FORCE a company to share it's patents.

Re:Really?

[crawling_chaos]

Yes you can, you simply change the law. Patents are not inherent to the organization of the universe, and a compulsory license requirement would be in no way unconstitutional.

Re:Really?

[SJHillman]

Isn't it the dream of every company to kill the competition? And isn't the point of patents controlling your innovations, including limiting your competition from using them? It seems to me they're taking a fairly normal and ethic (as far as businesses are ethical these days) route to the whole thing. It's bad business for everyone if companies believe they can get away with infringing patents and then just pay for licensing if they get caught.

Re:Really?

[Genda]

The entire point of patents was to promote invention and empower human economy. Honeywell killed off its remote thermostat product line long ago and has no intention of producing any more... they just want to make sure nobody else can enter that business either. That is expressly AGAINST the entire point of patents and their current use as a bludgeon to hold the world at large hostage has rendered them not only nonproductive but profoundly harmful to human enterprise.

The use of patents to cut up human IP into little fiefdoms, and turn corporations into despotic warlords, holders of IP to control and dominate society has become detrimental to human advancement, social well being and and the future of new businesses. We need to change IP laws to protect inventors, but prevent corporations from using IP as a means to destroy fair competition, promote monopolies and as such place the public in the stranglehold of sole proprietorship. It is a natural process as we move towards an information society to have IP become the currency of trade. It is therefore detrimental to society to put artificial boundaries on the free market of ideas and IP. We need to change the way that IP is managed, such that inventors are rewarded... specific people who hold patents on created works and are fairly remunerated for their inventions by both their companies and society at large. As such we also need to limit or eliminate the right of corporations to own patents, because they are compelled to use them as tools to dominate the market.

All of this is the mischief that descends from corporations having human rights without human limitations. It is also high time to define corporations properly as human enterprises, giving them the appropriate rights and freedoms to operate and thrive and remove the privileges that have proven so detrimental to society, human existence and life on the planet in general. We are at a historic nexus and our future demands that we stop and look at what contributes to our future and what threatens it. We carry tremendous baggage from the past, some of it wisdom, some if it atrocity. We need to consciously choose a future and invent who and what we are going to be. To do less, is take our hands off the wheel and simply hope that things will turn out. Good luck with things just turning out.

Re:Really?

[hey!]

And we probably should have some provision for mandatory licensing, if we're going to grant patents like this one:

A thermostat having a thermostat housing and a rotatable selector disposed on the thermostat housing. The rotatable selector adapted to have a range of rotatable positions, where a desired parameter value is identified by the position of the rotatable selector along the range of rotatable positions. The rotatable selector rotates about a rotation axis. A non-rotating member or element, which may at least partially overlap the rotatable selector, may be fixed relative to the thermostat housing via one or more support member(s). The one or more support member(s) may be laterally displaced relative to the rotation axis of the rotatable selector. The non-rotatable member or element may include, for example, a display, a button, an indicator light, a noise making device, a logo, a temperature indicator, and/or any other suitable device or component, as desired.

[US Patent 7159789].

So what is the invention here? A rotating selector that "rotates about a rotation axis?" What else would it rotate about? A rotating selector that can be used to set a desired parameter by rotatable position? How else would a rotating selector be used? A thermostat where the the temperature setting input is "disposed on" the housing?

What they're describing here isn't a mechanism, it's a *design*.

Re:the thing is

[Trepidity]

They are indeed extremely lame-looking patents, even by the usual standards of patent lameness. Several of them are an attempt to patent early-20th-century button/knob technology, and several others are an attempt to patent standard 1930s-50s control theory. Oh, except with the phrase "used in a thermostat" or "in an HVAC system" added, which makes it totally novel.

One of the patents is for this earthshattering invention: a system that can change from an initial temperature to a second temperature, while indicating on a display an ETA for reaching the target temperature.

Another one is for this: a display with a circular housing over it, where rotating the housing, by means of a potentiometer to which it is attached, changes an HVAC system parameter.

And yet another one is this: a display that asks a user questions in natural language, displays a menu of possible responses (such as "yes" and "no") among which the user may select, and then adjusts an HVAC system's configuration as a result of the user's response.

A bit of a contradiction

[sunking2]

Nest keeps being referred to as novel and innovative in the article and honeywell as the old giant, yet how can that really be when they clearly infringed on patents that honeywell previously had. Honeywell was clearly more novel and innovative before Nest even existed.

Re:But the patents can be BS

[DeadCatX2]

>.> Reading comprehension fail?

Honeywell's thermostat is parasitically powered, not their sensors. I'm saying the general technique - drawing power from other devices over e.g. data lines - is obvious to anyone skilled in the art of circuitry.

Here's a Maxim DS18S20 1-wire parasite-powered digital thermometer chip. http://www.maxim-ic.com/datasheet/index.mvp/id/2815

Arduino parasitic power. http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Learning/OneWire

Hell. RFID chips derives power parasitically from the transmitter.

Re:Get a Nest

[Myopic]

You just compared a learning thermostat to a programmable thermostat. That leads me to this question:

Nest $249
Oranges $1.29/pound

So who is more expensive?

Re:the thing is

[jbengt]

You are confusing the "lameness" of the patent with the "lameness" of the feature.

Re:the thing is

[Miamicanes]

Actually, that one's not quite as ridiculous as it sounds, assuming the technology isn't much different from home thermostats. AFAIK, home thermostats in an old home with only a furnace might have as few as two wires: one that's approximately 24Vac, and one that gets connected to it whenever the furnace should turn on. A newer home with an air conditioner might have two or more additional contacts for the a/c compressor & blower, and possibly 24vac of its own. I believe that most use battery power for the digital logic, but use the 24vac to energize the relay coils. I believe most home digital thermostats were historically battery-powered because the logic doesn't draw much power, and because it prevented the programming from getting lost whenever the power were shut off at the breaker.

Fast forward to 2012. For literally a few cents, you can buy an 8-bit microcontroller with real eeprom and flash, and a linear power supply to convert 24vac into 5vdc is far from being rocket science. Instead of relying upon continuous power to keep the settings alive, you can just write them to flash, and read them back when power gets restored. I believe this is more or less the nature of their patent.

Assuming I'm mostly right, this is a pretty lame patent. Unfortunately, it probably does meet the technical standards for being granted. I can only assume that Honeywell grabbed it because the market for home thermostats has traditionally been so small, few other companies have even bothered with it (I mean, let's be honest... how often do most people REALLY replace their thermostats?), so nobody else even thought about filing a patent for it first.