Creating Flight Plans Online? Patented! Small Company Sued Out Of Business For Not Wanting To Pay $3.2 Million Per Month
from the oh-come-on dept
Thanks to Kiran Lightpaw for alerting us to yet another example of patents being used to stifle innovation, rather than enable it. It involves a company called FlightPrep, that secured a patent (7,640,098) a year ago, covering generating a flight plan online and filing it online. Basically, it's one of your typical "just add online and patent it!" patents that never should have been granted. In fact, the patent, which was first applied for in 2001 was rejected repeatedly, and many adjustments had to be made before the patent examiner finally gave them the patent.Once they got the patent, they apparently started hitting up all sorts of online flightplan services for licenses -- even ones that appear to have been online predating some of the claims in their patent. Nelson Minar, who knows more than a little bit about software development, does a nice job highlighting that there appears to be a fair bit of prior art to the claims that were actually approved.
While some firms just paid up rather than spend the million dollars plus it would cost to fight this in court, one small operator, RunwayFinder, chose not to do so, and PrepFlight responded by suing RunwayFinder for $3.2 million per month for creating a rather straightforward "draw a flightplan online" app. How this is not "obvious to those skilled in the art" is beyond me (and many other software developers in the space, such as Minar). In response, RunwayFinder has shut down its service. FlightPrep, sensing some seriously bad PR among people who actually use its software scrambled to offer RunwayFinder a free license... but only until an agreement is worked out or the lawsuit concludes. RunwayFinder's creator notes that since FlightPrep won't drop the lawsuit, he doesn't feel it's right to accept the license, which certainly makes sense.
FlightPrep's open letter about the patent to the community is pretty unintentionally funny:
We realized that it is impossible for us, and for that matter, any business, to develop the proprietary technology to provide useful products and services, while at the same time giving it away and remain a viable business. Thus, we filled for a patent in 2001 with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).I'm really trying to figure out what one has to do with the other. The first sentence has no connection to the second sentence. You can absolutely develop a proprietary technology to provide useful products and services and build a viable business without filing for a patent. Hell, I've done it. I'm also not sure what 'giving it away for free" has to do with anything either. Pricing decisions are separate from pretty much everything else in both of those sentences.
It is not our intent to create a monopoly, put others out of business, or prevent others from participating in the aviation community.Well, you failed on all three counts then. A patent is a monopoly (that's what they were originally called), so pretending otherwise is pretty disingenuous. And it looks like RunwayFinder has been put out of business and are prevented from participating in the aviation community.
Just the fact that there are so many players competing in this space seems to show pretty clearly that (a) the concept was the natural progression in the space, and thus "obvious" and not patentable (b) that the market does not and did not need patents to develop. About the only thing the patent appears to be doing is hindering innovation, either by making a bunch of companies feel the need to pay up to avoid a lawsuit or shut down to avoid the lawsuit. That's not innovation. That's blackmail.
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.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: flight plans, patents
Companies: flightprep, runway finder
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
That's not innovation. That's blackmail.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: That's not innovation. That's blackmail.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Start naming the patent examiners that are not doing their job and just "giving in." We pay them to make sure this kind of abuse doesn't happen.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
This thread http://opensource.com/law/10/11/software-too-abstract-be-patented on swpat includes comments by a patent examiner over.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
The name of the patent examiner (oftent two) is listed on the front page of every patent. Every. Single. One. Go look - I'll wait.
Back yet? OK, anything else you'd like to add?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Online...
; P
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Quite apart from the unreliability of these statistics for low traffic websites like RunwayFinder's, if PrefFlight's lawyers do actually know how to get a 100% conversion rate from general web traffic (possibly greater than that if they didn't use the unique visitors figure) then they are clearly in the wrong line of business.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Blackmail?
Wouldn't 'extortion' or 'racketeering' be a better description?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
defend patent in court
EG. this patent is obvious, patent is invalidated, case dismissed.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: defend patent in court
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: defend patent in court
The bad news: patent reviews aren't exactly full of sanity and reason either.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: defend patent in court
It is. Any time a patentee files suit on their patent they are opening it up to a counterclaim of invalidity, and the defendant has the opportunity to build a case for invalidity using evidence (as opposed to conjecture). The statutory presumption of validity is only that, a presumption.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I'm a student pilot right now. The process of earning a license, especially if one wants to do so without going into debt, is long, arduous and expensive. RunwayFinder was an invaluable resource to me as a student, enabling me to study charts nationwide and plan flights without even getting in the cockpit. I could study airspace, look at obstructions, get airfield information, and find backup fields with very little work. And, unlike SkyVector (which caved to FlightPrep's blackmail), it actually worked in Google Chrome.
This is a terrible patent that should never have been issued. Not only is it incredibly vague and bloody obvious, but they used legal sleight of hand in the form of a divisional patent to back-date their "flight planning" patent to 2001 by attaching it to an earlier filing. The divisional patent was filed on September 28, 2005, well after RunwayFinder and a number of other flight planning sites were already online.
In short, FlightPrep killed an incredibly valuable educational and flight safety resource with their greed.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
This Is On the Supreme Court Agenda.
http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/11/supreme-court-to-decide-microsoft-patent-case-that -could-make-it-easier-to-invalidate-patents.html
There is no reason that the Supreme Court cannot go all the way, and create a presumption of invalidity. The whole idea of presumption of validity, inn the largest sense of the word, was that people further down the line had greater opportunities to confront the actual facts than the people who eventually ruled on the cases. For example, witnesses actually appeared before a trial court, and an appeals court have to give some deference to what the trial court had made of them. However, the reality of a patent case is that the court and the lawyers have the time and money to become far better acquainted with the facts of a patent case than a patent examiner on a time clock can do.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: This Is On the Supreme Court Agenda.
Now, even if he wanted to or was supposed to (which he might not and is not), that would be a heck of a lot of prior art to master and on what time? It is impossible to master all that code. At best, you would have to take an average of a few of the top contributors/maintainers from almost every open source project and then require that each of these experts check off each patent that goes through the system. Is this humanly possible to ask of each expert (to skim and maybe study on the order of hundreds of software patents per year each)? Will they get paid? Will they get paid enough to stop doing what they like to do or to cut short their business to tend to the USPTO? Will the USPTO ever seriously consider paying all of these people to do what they will view as duplicate work and against the interests of their paying clients and might lead them to turn a significant profit into a loss?
Of course, without doing this work, we need to presume invalidity as you mentioned.
And software is information. Patents were not intended to hold back progress over information that is $0 marginal costs in time, money, energy, and materials to manufacture and distribute and where free expression rights are also at stake. [even if the inventiveness bar was high, which it most certainly isn't, and this has very serious consequences for a field jam-packed with innovating participants because costs are so low to participate -- it's information creation utilizing "household appliances".]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: This Is On the Supreme Court Agenda.
The burden of proof should be on the applicant not others.
He should go to court and show how that it has a valid patent not others having to defend themselves and prove that the patent is invalid, of course this would be the government paying for the legal costs, which would mean tax payers money, but since this is a serious thing after all you are granting super power to someone it should be very carefully analyzed, not rubber stamped and praying for the best.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I wonder how the big boys are feeling
Unfortunately for Flight Prep and fortunately for general aviation it is a pretty small community; I can't believe that this company won't be hurt by the negative publicity and commentary on their boneheaded tactics.
AOPA should weigh in on this.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: I wonder how the big boys are feeling
and others. Unfortunately, it looks as if this has only been available to those who can afford obscenely expensive patent attorneys.
If you read between the lines of AOPA's and fltplan.com's statements, they are quite plain - a resounding "dont muck with me, little troll, lest you get reamed..."
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
HMM
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: HMM
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: HMM
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-literary-patents.html
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
DUATS
I've been using DUATS to get weather briefings, generate and file flight plans online since 1990.
They mention DUATS in their patent filing, noting that it's primarily a text based solution.. and thus seem to be claiming that their main invention is doing this in a web browser "with a housekeeping frame".
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Al Gore
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
bogus
Then I can dictate the cost for online flight planning and become a mega-millionaire!!!!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I'm gonna own it all!!!
(with apologies to my AOPA red board fiends)
Process For Generating Computer Flight Plans on the Internet
Abstract
A process for generating computer flight plans on the Internet with the elements of: a raw XY&Z database of chart data, a data base containing aircraft data, a software system to create VFR, IFR and Road charts, an Internet web site accessible by a Client computer, a software system which computes flight plans requested by the Client computer, a software system which allows for navigation data and aircraft editing by means of the Internet web site Client computer, and a software system which allows for outputting flight plans by means of the Internet web site Client computer. A alternate embodiment includes wherein said elements include a local area network consisting of a service and number of local Client computers or an Intranet network which is connected by means other than wires such as infrared or radio signals. A preferred embodiment includes further comprising the step(s) of computing by means of a software systems a cross section of the flight plan and displaying same in a profile window in which the route is displayed relative to terrain elevation, obstruction elevation, airspace, weather and flight altitude.
It also has the following:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
[0001]This invention relates generally to the field of aviation software, and more particularly to a process for generating computer flight plans on the Internet. However, as will become obvious later, additional applications of this invention may also include the field of cartography, route planning for motor vehicles, marine vehicles and similar utilization.
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-...DN/20100217520
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-literary-patents.html
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
America has fallen
[ link to this | view in chronology ]