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How Patent Trolls Stalled a New Transit App
SFGate has the story of Aaron Bannert, creator of a San Francisco transit app called Smart Ride. The app was developed to provide arrival times for the city's bus system. Smart Ride was supported by ads, and Bannert had not yet turned a profit on it when he received a legal threat from a company claiming patent infringement. "It was from a company with ties to Martin Kelly Jones, who holds a series of patents claiming ownership of technologies for tracking vehicles and providing users with electronic updates. A handful of affiliated companies, including ArrivalStar and Melvino Technologies, have threatened or sued hundreds of organizations in recent years, from small entrepreneurs like Bannert to large corporations like American Airlines. ... ArrivalStar filed more than half the patent lawsuits in South Florida federal courts last year, according to the South Florida Business Journal. ... ArrivalStar will demand as much as $200,000 for a license, according to reports in other publications." The cost to the patent troll for filing a lawsuit is around $500, but Bannert was forced to spend over $10,000 on a legal defense and delay the launch of a new version for months. He's unable to provide details on the outcome of the case. "As high as the legal expenses were for Bannert, he thinks the bigger toll from patent trolling is the indirect cost to society, the products and innovation that don't make it off the drawing board."
Seriously, if were considering setting up a new business model and didn't want to be dragged down by the hordes of patent-trolling parasites out there, NZ is starting to look good. Plus at 5 foot 10 inches I'm bound to be bigger than most of the Hobbits.
If you want to market or profit from your app, you most probably need some kind of company registration. Hence, you are trackable - at least your company is.
In the patent infringement case used as an example, the article wasn't explicit about whether the patents were on software. Probably they were software patents, since the example was about a software app.
The patent troll problem can easily extend beyond software or business methods. Doesn't have to be software to have prior art or to be too obvious. The reform of abolishing software patents wouldn't fix all the problems. We would still have a patent system that grants too many bad patents because of the conflicts of interest. The patent office generates more revenue, and lawyers get more work. The article mentioned plans for 5 executive actions to curb the problem, but didn't say what they are.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
This is the millionth time we see a post on Slashdot about people falling victim to a patent troll. If this is not yet done somewhere, someone should really make a wiki to meticulously document all these small cases, so that the next time you talk to a politician, you can show them the real damage of the current patent system.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Mplayer, libavcodec and x264 are examples of successfull patent-violating software products that have laster for a long while, and not been killed off by patent lawsuits. So it is clearly possible. The key is probably to be distributed, open source and not predominantly based in the USA.
Besides the fact that it's useful to repackage this function as an app (you can check the arrival time from home / the bar / your office and wait for the bus there instead of at the stop), the guy hardly deserves to be sued into the ground for not being innovative enough, in what looks like to be a case without merit. And that's the crux of the issue: you can sue anyone for patent infringement, and even if your case has mo merit whatsoever, you can still extort the defendant over legal fees. Pay the $500, pcik your target, any target, and offer to settle for half of what the defendant would pay in legal fees. Profit!
What if the guy actually comes up with a truly innovative app instead? You can be sure that the same patent trolls will be all over him as soon as he makes a buck.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Do you think e=mc^2 should be patentable? It certainly was valuable. We wouldn't understand nuclear power without it.
There may not be any such thing as a good software patent. Software shouldn't be patentable.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
First, don't make the mistake made by our coder in the story. He played the game and it cost him $10K, time and the time he put in on his app, as well as any future profits from it.
When you are contacted by lawyers, the name of their client is evident , making him easy to track down. For far less money, a common hoodlum could go negotiate directly with the patent troll with the stipulation that he is now insured against accidents, fires and sudden death for a small fee, collected periodically.
My God man! Turn the situation around and quit thinking in deficit terms or all you will ever have is deficit! The smart man doesn't allow himself to be under the control of other, less empowered peons.
Publish your app and punish the patent trolls and profit, don't pay. That's ridiculous.
If you're not intending to make any profit from it, then you can set up a company that has no assets to distribute the app. This will cost you a small amount, but it means that the patent troll can take the company to court if they want, but it will cost them money and the company will just declare bankruptcy without attending court and they won't be able to recoup their legal fees.
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oops.. Here's the settlement link
You can't withdraw the app, but you can publish all the source code for the app and let the patent troll bite into everyone that's building the app from that.
And you can also make sure that the app is provided and hosted on a server in a different country where software patents aren't valid or at least a lot harder to prove valid. That way the patent troll will at least have a harder time to achieve the goal.
Brings up another question - if I who don't live in the US publish an app that's downloadable from a server where I live and that app infringes an US patent - what can a patent troll do about it? The patent trolls goes for low hanging fruit, if they need to navigate wider then they have problems.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Smart Ride is actually a lot more than that. It takes advantage of the phone's capabilities to show nearby stops, maps, alerts, and other realtime info. I love those LED displays and use them all the time, but they aren't available at every stop. And we happen to support 45 or so transit agencies these days, all within one app.
We aren't trying to innovate in the vehicle tracking area. We are innovating around data aggregation (we have a huge and growing database of transit data, most of which is realtime) and around clever ways to present that data to our users. Smart Ride is one of those apps where it has to be on 24/7, be very fast, and very simple (so my mom can understand it). The whole point is to make transit easy for everyone.
But as another poster pointed out, the merits of my entrepreneurial pursuits (or lack thereof, your mind) shouldn't justify me being sued for patent infringement.
PS, that app you linked to is *not* an official SF MTA app. It is another 3rd party developer like me, who apparently is benefitting from the name confusion. As far as I know, SF MTA doesn't have an official app of their own.
Just a cautionary note that the corporate form is a strong firewall, but it's not impermeable. Courts can, and sometimes do, "pierce the corporate veil" of sham entities and hold the owner(s) responsible for the entities' actions. Under-capitalization (actually in your hypothetical, no capitalization) of the entity is one of the factors they look at.*
* This isn't legal advice; consult an attorney about your own particular situation; etc. etc.
That settlement happened merely a week ago, long after they sued my company (Codemass), and only applies to public transit agencies who are APTA members. (Meaning, it doesn't help any of the literally 100s of other victims of ArrivalStar, nor the future victims who aren't public transit entities).
Also, you are correct that some of ArrivalStar's claims in only 1 of their 30+ patents were recently invalidated, but other key claims remained in that patent and there's no evidence that ArrivalStar has any intention of slowing down.
In short: I couldn't afford to win. I was told $10-25k just for the initial response, and starting at ~$100k for a patent infringement review of my technology, and that barely gets us to pre-trial motions. If they actually went through with the case it would be hundreds of thousands more, and basically no end in sight. This is a startup I'm bootstrapping myself, and I can't even come close to these kinds of expenses.
The courts are a HUGE part of this problem. When I was served, the second packet was 10+ pages of dense legalese straight from the judge on the "pretrial rules". The trolls probably had to pay something like a $500 filing fee in the Southern District of Florida (a place I've never set foot in). And they have no on-shore assets to go after, so proving non-infringement or even proving malicious litigation would be a major uphill battle.
And to make matters worse, after actually suing me in Florida, they came back later and threatened to sue me in Canada for another batch of patents they owned there. So even if I had managed to not go completely destitute defending against them in the US, I'd have to do it all over again in Canada if I wanted to keep providing my app in Canada (where I support a few cities already).