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One Man's Battle With Patent Trolls
farrellj writes "Dovden Investments, labelled as a Patent Troll by many, got more than they bargained for when they went after Ottawa developer Larry Dunkelman. Mr. Dunkelman wrote BusBuddy, an app that takes GPS and scheduling data from OC Transpo, the local city bus service, and predicts when the bus you are waiting for will actually arrive. But when Dovden came along and asked for $10,000, as a 'licensing' fee, Dunkelman got angry, and decided to fight. 'They claim to have patented the method of using GPS location on vehicles to determine when they will arrive at a certain place,' Dunkelman said. 'This applies to buses, package delivery, airplanes, trains - any business that employs a fleet of vehicles in which they track their location to arrive at a certain place, is open to this patent troll.' Dunkelman hired an intellectual property lawyer and started chipping away at the company's claims. Dovden has since discontinued the suit and are now being chased by Dunkelman and his lawyer for legal costs."
Well done, Larry. I hope more developers have a spine as stiff as yours.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Distance / Speed = Time
Heck, we've probably been estimating our arrival times since we grew big enough brains to recognize a particular rock or tree.
Dovden asked for $10,000. There was probably only a 1 in 1000 chance someone would fight and win. Dovden knew for certain that their patent wasn't innovative; this was no honest misunderstanding. Any damages less than $10000 * 1000 = $10,000,000 makes this a profitable business model.
Any ruling fining Dovden less than $10,000,000 is not enough.
Does he have a donation box? I've donated to causes much less worthy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Any lawyer who aids a patent troll ought to be disbarred.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Are patent suit costs in Canada paid for by the losing party? This is one of the big problems in the US - each side usually pays its own costs, even when the patentee loses.
IANAL as will be pretty evident from this confused series of questions, but from the article: 'They claim to have patented the method of using GPS location on vehicles to determine when they will arrive at a certain place,'
So, did they patent it or not? And if they did, then who the hell approved it as a valid innovation???!
If they didn't patent it then it's just a case of straight up fraud isn't it? Conversely, if they do actually hold this patent, then isn't just as clear cut that this poor guy is infringing it - no matter how ridiculous that seems? The article seems to suggest that they are now reviewing whether the patent is valid or not - but once a patent is granted doesn't that automatically mean it's valid too?
What you are looking for here is something related to barratry. I wish such a concept actually applied in U.S. federal courts, although there are several states that have become enlightened enough that it does apply to those state court systems.
Even more important, I wish judges would actually enforce such a concept and disbar those who abuse the system. Unfortunately, in the "real world" you don't tend to find things so clear cut and lawyers being complete jerks. Usually they know at what point they are going to cross over the line and try to stay on the proper side of that line, even if they may tend to push those limits from time to time. It takes a real idiot of a lawyer who doesn't know the laws of their own profession.
Yes.
ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) has been used since long before we had computers.
Linking a patent to doing an ETA calculation based on location/vector data from a GPS is kind of like getting a patent for shoes if the cows the leather was made out of were grass fed.
Hardly surprising. Even a patent troll should know better than going after a guy whose name translates to The Dark Man.
Okay, I admit, I added the definite article for effect, but the rest is true. Source: I'm German
It is a Canadian case. You'll have to snow board them.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
We should draw up versions of all the popular software licenses, (MIT, BSD, GPL, etc.) that specifically exclude the patent troll town of Marshall, TX or even Harrison county, where many of the patent trolls file because of their "plaintiff friendly" juries. The town has benefited from all of the trolling, and they've set themselves up a little local industry for it. Let them do it without software. Maybe name it the Yee-Haw(R) license.