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: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.