Slashdot Mirror
Nest Labs Calls Honeywell Lawsuit 'Worse Than Patent Troll'
UnknowingFool writes "Over a year ago, Nest Labs launched the Learning Thermostat. The brainchild of Tony Fadell, former head of Apple's iPod and iPhone division, the Learning Thermostat promised a self-programming and wifi-enabled thermostat that would save energy costs. After some glowing reviews, Nest found itself in a patent infringement lawsuit against Honeywell. Nest responded with multiple claims calling Honeywell 'worse than a patent troll.' Among Nest's claims: Honeywell hid prior art (some on some previous patents that they owned) and inapplicable patents (patent on mechanical potentiometer when Nest's product does not include one). Nest's stance is that Honeywell filed the lawsuits not to extract money but to set back progress so that they can control the industry."
I thought allowing your products to succeed and preventing others from entering the market is part of the idea of a patent? Unlike a troll that has no product, at least Honeywell has one... Even if their claims do not apply. ;)
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
If they want to complain, they should be complaining about IP law rather than companies that use it as (apparently) intended.
And no, Honeywell isn't worse than a patent troll. I might have a teardrop or two of sympathy for Nest, if not for the overblown rhetoric.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Honeywell is turning up the heat on the competition...
Tony obviously didn't learn anything from Jobs. Tony should patent the shape of the honeywell thermostat and get injunctions against honeywell.
Honeywell is known for this type of practice. I remember the last sales rep that came to our office. His statement was along the lines of 'you should just buy from us because we own all the IP. Even if you buy from a distributor or competitor you are still buying from us.'
They want their section of the market and will do anything to keep it.
Nest's stance is that Honeywell filed the lawsuits not to extract money but to set back progress so that they can control the industry."
That would make this a Frivolous lawsuit , not a patent troll, and as such the defendant would be subject to compensation.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
TFA says:
and the patents in question should all be invalidated by prior art — even, in some cases, by previous Honeywell patents Nest claims the company hid from the Patent Office.
How did Honeywell hide previous patents that are, by the very nature of patents, publicly available? If they are expired patents that are relevant in proving prior art, Nest themselves should have found the patents in their own prior-art search. It's clear from the many patents that have been issued despite clear prior art that the patent office themselves does not do a sufficient job of searching for prior art.
While I do think that Honeywell is trying to shut out the competition, if they have a patent covering the technology that Nest is using, that's well within their rights. And since Honeywell does sell programmable thermostats, I think what they are doing is far less insidious than patent trolls that gather patent portfolios and using them to extract money from companies even though the troll has no intention of ever producing a product that uses the patent.
I've been thinking about replacing my home Honeywell thermostats (2) with Nests so that I can link, control, and monitor them more effectively. The news of this lawsuit has pretty much sold the deal.
I don't think Honeywell thought about the Streisand effect.
Since I am looking for a new thermostat this sounded like a cool thing. But this review by a fellow European warned me off trying this :
http://www.bjornsblog.nl/post/20583667249/using-the-nest-smart-thermostat-in-europe-not
To maintain their position and dominance.
This includes everything from managing the progress of technologies, to profits from the trade in drugs and armaments.
Law is your enemy. It was made without your representation, and adopted by managing your consent under a false pretense. Always treat it with suspicion.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Some friends installed a Nest recently and had issues. They spent an evening repeating the installation steps trying to understand what they did wrong and another evening on the phone with support, being told to repeat those steps again. Eventually they were told that their furnace didn't output enough power for the Nest thermostat and that they'd have to return the unit (to Amazon, I think) for a refund and pick some other thermostat brand.
They called up my dad the EE, who has no real thermostat or HVAC expertise but did install a new thermostat himself 20 years back. They described the error shown by the thermostat and their conversation with Nest support and he pointed out that "enough power" isn't a really relevant concept. He went over and tested the voltages on the well documented furnace connections and then on the relatively poorly documented Nest thermostat and found that the fault was with Nest. He called Nest support again and was told for half an hour that he was mistaken, then asked for a manager and convinced him that the problem was with their product, not the furnace. Once a warranty replacement arrived the problem was immediately solved.
It's just an anecdote, but it was impressive how much Nest support resisted and that the first unit arrived with a hardware problem. It made me wary of the company. Furthermore, the "learning" capabilities have been an utter failure for said friends. I think the current Nest thermostat is only meant to work for much more predictable people.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Honeywell has been doin their thing since 1906. They have thousands if not more products. They are pretty much THE thermostat company.
Thousands if not more patents. Billions in cash and profits.
Nest labs was started in 2010. And this is the first and only thing they have ever made.
Yeah.... Patent troll... One company does look like one that's for sure. Or no wait. Patent infringer... Yeah that fits perfectly.
It seems like the new thing to do if you get sued for patent infringement is to scream "patent troll." Patent trolls are generally non-practicing entities, which Honeywell is definitely not.
Additionally, complaining about Honeywell's goal of monopolizing the field is also silly because that's what patents are supposed to do. Patents allow you to make something without others being allowed to compete for ~20 years.
Finally, you can't "hide prior art." The whole point of prior art is that it's accessible. If it was hidden, then it doesn't count as prior art as far as the law is concerned.
It seems recently that /. has taken a "patents are evil" attitude. This is a very silly attitude for a site that deals primarily with technology related news. Patents are the reason that companies can make money off technological inventions. Patents aren't evil.
Honeywell is notorious for running competitors out of business, or buying up competitors and then simply discontinuing all their products. Specifically to control the market.
A good example of this is the window fan market, which Honeywell has almost a complete monopoly.
Several years ago there was a company called Lakewood Engineering that made, by far, the most effective and silent 'economic' household window fan. Honeywell bought them, and discontinued the model irregardless of the fact that their entire fan line was significantly inferior.
Patent trolling is just mild flirtation with evil from a company like Honeywell...ask Honeywell what it's been up to in Laos. Pathetic scumbags. Yeah, I do try to avoid buying their *shit*.
This one is also covered by a previous patent that Honeywell owns. It's the patent for the Magic-Stat. It was developed by an inventor in Ann Arbor, Michigan back in the 70's or 80's. Honeywell bought that patent years ago. I knew someone who knew the inventor, and had one myself. That was it's big claim to fame - the thermostat "learns" your space's thermal inertia so as to achieve the desired temperature at the desired time. It also had the same schedule learning concept i.e. just jump up and adjust the thermostat when you feel uncomfortable, and the thermostat will eventually figure it out.
When I saw the Nest thermostat I yawned, since I had these features 20 years ago, albiet without Internet connectivity.
From what I've heard they did actually think up the concept of a smart thermostat before Nest, but decided that wasn't sufficiently profitable or marketable. That right there should have invalidated their patents. Patents were intended to give individuals/companies a temporary monopoly to benefit society with new ideas & inventions, not as flack to shoot down their competition.
If you do it big enough, you only have to pay if you lose.
I'm in the aerospace industry where Honeywell is a major player, mainly in avionics. The last several years they have stopped to issue new repair/overhaul manuals for their units, prohibiting 3rd party shops performing maintenance on units. Honeywell obviously charges about an extra zero tacked to the end vs. anybody else to perform the same work. Just last week we recieved a copy of a 'repair manual' we requested that spent 50 pages talking about fault checking (we know the unit doesnt work....) and then a few pages with nice illustrations of how to package and ship the unit to Honeywell for repair.
A few years ago we were selling overhauled 'items' to the government for drones. These items were originally made by honeywell, when they found out they pulled the repair manuals and gave us a call, explaining their size vs our size in the industry and what they could do to us if they so choose.
Horrible company.
Like many other people and innovative corporations, I'm sick and tired of seeing patent litigation used as a business strategy (assuming that Nest legitimately did not steal any creation from Honeywell). I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps I'm missing some nuance of IP law, but I've always wondered why these laws aren't written in a way that deters frivolous lawsuits. So for example, if you want to sue someone for $10 million because you feel that that person or corporation stole a creation of yours, fine. But if the judge finds your claims are not valid and that you're suing just to squash a competitor, you then owe the defendant the same amount of money that you are suing them for. Thus, if you go into court without solid evidence, you risk paying dearly for such a strategy. Right now, the problem seems to be there is no risk in suing someone other than some lawyer and court fees. Even if you lose, you kinda win by potentially tying a competitors hands behind their backs, esp if they're a small startup. For certain time-sensitive products (esp in technology), this can be a death sentence.
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
Sounds like we need a new term for players like Honeywell, since they're far worse than trolls; they just want to impede all progress if it isn't made by them, and use bogus patents to do so.
ProgressTrolls? Sounds accurate and properly demeaning...
Oh, and: Fuck you Honeywell. Man up and get in the game with a real product to compete with instead of a stack of USPO filings and legal briefs or get out of the way so some grownups can, you know, advance society.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I am a former (thankfully) Honeywell employee, and I can say first hand that their patent process is a complete and utter joke. Their patent lawyers frequently rewrite and change the language in the patent application to make them more broad and general, and they often end up not resembling at all what the Engineer intended.
They pay employees to submit patent ideas in the hopes they'll come up with something they can troll down the road.
Honeywell must truly be getting desperate. They're a terrible company to work for in the first place, and when I left it was during a wave of brain drain that would make any technology company blush - but not Honeywell. They were happy to see American employees leave.
Okay, it's round. But everyone knows why they made it round, because all of us grew up with round Honeywell thermostats. If I made an MP3 player that looked exactly like the original iPod, or a car that look exactly like the original Mustang, I would make plans to eventually expect a letter from Apple or Ford. You can't tell me that Nest Labs is not smart enough to know they would eventually get a letter from Honeywell.
The guy was the head of the iPhone and iPod division...
Not quite the original idea.. that whole "keep exclusive so we have an incentive" came along later.
Brunelleschi (of Duomo Dome fame) got what was generally considered the first patent in 1421. And it was because it was for a way to move very large blocks of stone on the river, something that could not possibly be hidden as a trade secret. Therefore, he got the local duke (or whatever) to issue a document that said, Ol' Filippo came up with this cool idea, you're all going to see it, but you can't use it.
Honeywell certainly didn't do any research or even planning to come up with the products I tried. Unnecessary features, unwanted features and worse, inaccessible features. The first one I tried had a Change Filter warning come on after 3 months, so I changed the filter. The thermostat had no way to reset that function, even taking the battery out didn't do it Maybe there is a way but I didn't feel like spending the time to find it. It continued to say Change Filter till I ripped it out of the wall and replaced it with an old fashioned analog thermostat that works a lot better.
"which covers "power-stealing" to charge the thermostat's battery from the control wires"
They awarded a patent for combined power/control lines??? Like every fricking phone has done in the olden days???? What the hell is the patent office up to?
"#7,159,789, which covers a thermostat with a rotatable selector dial partially hidden behind a non-moving cover"
Oh for frigs sake, at what point do any of these things represent an invention? If I take a 70's radio and it has a dial partly covered by a non movable cover, does it make any difference what that dial is changing??? Where's the invention???
They've just patented a lot of trivial detail in the hope of protecting their market, and USPTO being the joke that it is, grants them all.
Do you remember that patents are supposed to REWARD innovation to ENCOURAGE it, USPTO? They're not just a fee you collect for rubber-stamping documents!
Pitiful.
I find it ironic that anyone who used to work for Apple is outraged by a company that hits them with "patent infringement", to delay their progress and control market share. See Apple VS Samsung, Apple VS Motorola, Apple VS Amazon, etc, etc.
I was considering replacing my ancient round thermostat with a programmable one. I swear their used to be programmable stats that had the classic round form factor, but all those for sale now are rectangular, which would look ridiculous in the middle of the round escutcheon the current one is mounted upon (which I have no interest in removing and dealing with what lies beneath it, paint-wise).
I did remove my Honeywell rogrammable to install my Nest last year. Honeywell loses.
Most of these claims by Nest are poppycock. For example in US 7,634,504 is cited 5,065,813 which NEST claims was not shown to the PTO by Honeywell.
Nice catch there. From the article:
#7,634,504, which is Honeywell's wild patent for using natural language prompts to program a thermostat. Nest says this is a retread of patent #5,065,813, which was filed 15 years earlier and not shown to the PTO by Honeywell.
And here is the '813 patent cited on the '504 patent (10th one down on page 2).
"Those who can, do. Those who can't, litigate."