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Crazy Patent Troll Suing Devs For Posting Apps To Google Play (technobuffalo.com)
Developer Austin Meyer is fighting back patent trolls after he was sued for putting his flight simulator app called X-Plane on Google Play. TechnoBuffalo reports: A few years ago, he uploaded the app to the Google Play Store and was very unexpectedly hit with a lawsuit from Uniloc in 2012. The firm claims it patented the idea behind the app market. That's right, Uniloc isn't going after Meyer for making a flight simulator; it's going after any company that uses Google Play. It's already targeted a bunch of other popular apps, including Minecraft. So Meyer did a bit of digging and discovered a few pretty shocking details. It turns out the judge in that district may have a direct relationship with the prosecuting lawyer in many of these cases. The judge, Leonard Davis, is apparently known for almost never throwing out patent lawsuits. Meyer claims that his son, Bo Davis, is the lawyer representing many of these patent trolls.
According to Wikipedia, Judge Davis retired from the eastern district of Texas a year ago. Why is he still hearing cases?
Yes, if true, there's a potential conflict of interest there, and it could explain a lot about why the eastern district of Texas is so amazingly pro-patent-troll, but at this point, it is water under the bridge. It would have been nice to have known that five or ten years ago; there are a number of ways that the problem could have been resolved, up to and including removing the judge in question if he didn't recuse himself from cases tried by his son going forward. But now that he's retired, there's nothing that can be done, and either the problem has been resolved (in which case he was the problem) or it hasn't (in which case he wasn't).
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Judicial BIAS you say??? Nooo Judges are robots incapable of influence.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145560612726/the-robot-judge
Just like politicians can take millions of dollars without effecting their votes.
The developer got sued in the Eastern District of Texas, where almost all patent cases are filed. A lawyer that handles some patent cases has a father that is/was a judge in the same district, neither fact would be particularly startling to learn. Dad is stepping down from the bench to go into private practice for patents. No allegations that any case filed by the son was heard by the dad.
Unless there's more here than is being said, there's no story here aside from a stupid patent troll filing a stupid troll case.
and claim I invented the concept of roads
Geez, all this time and nobody noticed that the district judge presiding over these patent cases was the father of the attorney who represented these patent trolls? Not even the company lawyers from Apple or Microsoft said, "Hey judge, we think there may be a conflict of interest here since the plaintiff's lawyer happens to be related to you."
Bizarre.
Given MS owns it and has a one or two lawyers, patents, and a little available cash to defend itself that seems to be an odd target to pick. Given MS also has an app store I would think they will fight this to protect their interests; a win would be good for everyone. MS and good, two things you never thought you'd hear together on /.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Google has more money and lawyers than just about anyone and it is their app store that is at the center of the whole dispute. Why don't they grow a pair and help defend the app developers who use their store and have been sued? Nice business partner their Google ...
When GRiD Systems released their first laptop, the Compass 1101, in 1981 it had a built-in 1200 baud modem. It ran GRiD OS, a multi-tasking operating system. They also had the concept of an app store, where a user could purchase apps and the laptop would connect to a central server and download the apps. I'm sure their patents have expired.
Note: I worked at GRiD while in college.
Here is a good talk about the GRiD Compass by Jeff Hawkins, who later founded Palm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
I don't understand why these go ahead because in this case the developer is a user of the application store. The lawsuit should be against Google if the patent is for an app market. It would be as if I had a patent on a car engine part and then started filing lawsuits against people who bought cars instead of the car engine manufacturers.
Yet another example that illustrates why I think we would be better off if access to the civil court system were made significantly more difficult for plaintiffs than defendants. There are various ways in which we might do this. Yesterday's thread attracted a lot of posts in favor of loser pays, which privileges the wealthier litigant unless judges have discretion in charging costs to the losing party.
My own suggestion was to tighten up the evidence rules and jury voting in civil procedure to match the tougher standards of criminal procedure, a change which would inhibit junk suits (the kind at issue yesterday) without limiting anyone's access to the courts for cases which they themselves perceive as being able to jump the higher evidence bar. This elicited predictions that civilization would collapse if even that modest reform were made to the civil lawyer gravy train.
I also think that judges should have discretion to lock out civil plaintiffs who have a filing history that fits the old common-law definition of 'barratry'. The responses were equally negative. But no, I still don't want to go on living under a legal system that feels threatened by common sense. Let's vote for the candidate most likely to blow it to hell.
It took some minor Googling, but I found the patent that Uniloc is claiming Austin Meyer violated.
According to this post by Meyer, they first claimed he violated one claim on the patent:
Now, is it just me or could that describe any authorization system? For example, you install some software product, get a license key from the company, and use it to prove to the software that you actually bought it and should be allowed to run it.
So Meyer fought for three years and finally got this claim overturned. The patent office admitted this claim shouldn't have been approved. Victory, right? Nope. Uniloc is now claiming that he's violating:
This patent has 113 claims. Even if he took them out five at a time, at the current rate it would take him 68 YEARS for the patent to be tossed out entirely. Meanwhile, he'll rack up tons of legal fees (not to mention time/stress/life disruption) and Uniloc will just keep playing patent whack-a-mole.
BTW, that "claim 1" that #21 references?
This looks suspiciously like #107. It's like they built in redundancy in their patent trolling. "Take out a couple of our claims. No problem. We've got five more like them in the same patent and ten other patents just like this one waiting in the wings."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Is when they are giving walled gardens and artificially limited app sources a hard time. I hope anyone that lets Google or Apple limit their device to only where they say it can get apps from gets bit by it too. Buying a device and letting a company limit who you can get software from just so they can enforce that they get a piece of the pie is just ludicrous. Apple or Google don't have the slightest fuck of a say what I do with my own device once I have bought it. Go get 'em troll!
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
> According to Wikipedia, Judge Davis retired from the eastern district of Texas a year ago. Why is he still hearing cases?
The suit was originally filed in 2012. The last motion I found was early 2015. So most of this case occurred prior to Judge Davis leaving the bench.
But now that he's retired, there's nothing that can be done
If the allegations are true then surely his actions are against the law, corruption or perverting the course of justice come to mind but IANAL. So surely charing him with a suitable offence followed by prison time if convicted would be something that could be done regardless of whether or not he is retired.
That's interesting. I sent Meyer a note quoting what you said.
Conflict of interests. Illegal too. Leonard Davis will be removed from the bench AND disbarred. Not if, but when.
Fortunately ... not my battle. It'll be a battle to get there though.
you patent loving babies are just scared of a real free market
capitalism haters.
I have a patent on first posts. You'll be hearing from my lawyer. See you in Texas!
Wanna buy a shirt?
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it sounds like Austin Meyer should start by having a talk with his son.
Retired judges seem to get hired all the time as "special masters" or other one-time positions they don't want to use regular sitting judges for. It almost seems to be like military officers, they may step down from the bench but they seem to retain their judge credentials somehow, just like officers may retire from the military but can be recalled if they haven't also resigned their commissions.
This wouldn't happen at all if we could just admit that patents don't provide any benefits to society at all, and just banned them entirely.
Here is a transcript from a show that ABC did on Uniloc 4 years ago. This is about the case with Microsoft. It was presented as a David vs. Goliath struggle:
http://www.abc.net.au/austory/content/2012/s3473536.htm
There's a jurisdiction that recognizes software patents?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Fuck this patent mess which Congress REFUSES TO FIX. Lesser of two evils: Clinton (more of the same) or Trump (disruptive change). There's a lot I don't like about the Don, but if he promises to ambush patent trolling with a sledgehammer to forever put a stop this asshattery, the tech community would get behind him.
as though he is human with human tendencies and fallibility and bias!!!!!
Politicians, many of whom are lawyers, and the lawyers and judges with whom they socialize routinely tell us that members of the legal profession are super-human in their ethics and we should not question them when they rule in ways that seem to line-up with their own personal political or financial interests. Except, of course for those nasty issues of gender and skin color where that old rule no longer is politically acceptable...
For the past several decades, we've been told that we must have black judges, Hispanic judges, women judges, now a black president, and soon a female president, etc because we are all human and each of us cannot help but be influenced by our histories and life experiences. Whenever a white male judge or politician acts "the wrong way", we have been told he was in some way corrupt or "obviously" biased. Indeed, when president Obama nominated Justice Sotomayor, we were told the court needed a "wise Latina" whose history would positively affect her rulings.
Now Trump, whose big thing is border control and restoring US jobs, comes along and says that a Hispanic judge who has been ruling hostile to him, recently dumped a bunch sealed documents into the public and then feigned an attempt to re-seal them, is apparently the son of illegals, has been giving money to illegals, and belongs to one of a bunch of racially-aligned groups named "La Rasa" (in English: "The [Hispanic] Race") is possibly biased against him and BAM! Trump is universally condemned as a RACIST!.
There's a common thread in this cloak:
The simple FACT is that judges are just human beings like the rest of us. They all carry the baggage the rest of us carry, and that includes personal baggage tied to their gender and skin color, as well as the human tendency to be influenced by their personal family and financial concerns. Denial of the basic humanity of judges, whether for good or ill, is not sane, no matter the politics and sensitivities.
Trump's concerns about his judge are rational and "common sense" and had the judge in that case been truly honest and trustworthy he would have recused himself the moment Trump tossed his hat into the political arena to eliminate any appearance of conflict of interests. The judge in this patent case, had he truly been trustworthy, should have recused himself on the same grounds. The best judges know that they themselves are only human and being both self-aware and aware of the degree of societal trust required for a functional justice system, will automatically recuse themselves in such cases. Those who do not automatically step aside and have their cases reassigned for the benefit of the system are sending a rather different signal.
Google needs to stomp these idiots flat. It should be trivially easy to do so with their war chest. In any event no sane judge would even hear a case of "infringement" that didn't involve a plaintiff who was in any way the infringer.
Great, I've got a patent on replies to first posts so I'll see you there.
I hold the patent on sarcastic lawsuit posts, I'll be seeing you both there.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
My wife recently fed a stray dog.. now the dog won't leave. Words of advice hidden in plain site. If a patent troll sends you a letter, ignore it. On the contrary, if everyone were to boycott Google Play and iOS app-store, these big boys would likely do what's right and put their money towards protecting developers. Bottom line, this patent trolling needs to end and it is the duty of the providers to put their billions towards action to eliminate said trolls.
I patented lawsuits several hundred years ago, I'll see everyone now.