Klausner Adds Another Visual Voicemail Patent Lawsuit
from the whoops,-missed-one dept
Small patent holding firm Klausner Technologies has sued HTC for infringing the patents on visual voicemail it says it holds, adding the phone maker to a long list of companies that have been attacked with the overly broad patent. Just as in the previous cases, it's not clear how this system actually helps anybody that's doing any actual innovation; the company with the patent, but which has never apparently done anything to actually bring it to market, gets to assess an innovation tax on companies doing the actual legwork. Meanwhile, the idea underlying the patent -- displaying voicemail info on a screen -- really isn't much more than a foreseeable progression of technology. So carry on, patent system, holding back innovation and misaligning incentives.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: patents, visual voicemail
Companies: htc, klausner
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It was obvious then. Maybe not to retards like yourself, but to the rest of society it was.
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Possibly, you meant to say something like
"look back from todays perspective and (quantify?) something as obvious ..." ?. You forgot the part about someone practiced in the field.
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Good lord, these guys can make a fortuine suing everyone without even creating a competing product.
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This is another good case for an independent invention argument for obviousness.
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A patent of a toaster would patent the specific mechanical interactions that go on inside the product that lowers bread into a small oven, then pops it up with a timer. The patent would not be able to protect the overall idea of "a small kitchen appliance that automatically toasts bread to the desired amount."
Another example is that of transistors. The original transistor design is not what we use today, even though it was patented. People found better ways to do the same thing and that's what we use today.
So how can companies patent overall ideas like visual voice mail? Wouldn't they have to patent the actual method of translating the voice mail on phone company servers into a visual UI?
I guess this would go back to the whole nonsense of patenting software.
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Way to counter your own point: Just because you patent an idea doesn't mean you're the rightful holder of that IP.
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Your saying patents are so important because the patent system is broken? Because no one looks for prior art or tries to verify the credibility of an application?
That's some hilarious circular logic you've got going there. "We need patents to protect ourselves from patent trolls! Without the patent system, someone else could claim the patents!"
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Great system there.
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Here You Are! In Concrete Detail.
You see?
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reply to commentor #1
There was a post recently on this blog that this comment reminds e of; it was something like 'if you have an idea to program some function but don't know how to do it, outsource the problem to a bunch of IT guys and they'll come up with the code'. Software patents are bs because the code used belongs to everyone, and the 'inventor' is really just using that code to perform a function on a computer, he's not inventing anything. The concept of photo voicemail is pretty obvious, think Star Trek back in the 60's where images were displayed on a screen and people talked to each other through those screens, wouldn't take a genius to think of voicemail using video even back then. The steps involved to do that could be 'invented' by any decent programmer.
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