stories filed under: "patent troll"

Google Sued For Patent Infringement For Mobile Chrome

from the of-course dept

Wed, Jul 11th 2012 11:14pm — Mike Masnick

Because no new products can be released these days without getting sued for patent infringement, Google has been sued by EMG Technology -- yet another patent holder that isn't actually competing or innovating suing companies that are. The issue is Google's recently released Chrome browser for the mobile phone, which EMG claims violates its patent, 7,441,196 on an "apparatus and method of manipulating a region on a wireless device screen for viewing, zooming and scrolling internet content." EMG points out that Apple sought to have this patent re-examined and it survived. Despite the fact that the inventors of the patent all appear to reside in Southern California, EMG is located in Southern California and Google is based in Northern California, take one guess where this lawsuit was filed... Why East Texas, of course. Because that makes no sense at all. And people wonder why we say that the patent system has become a tax on innovation.

Filed Under: android, chrome, east texas, patent troll
Companies: emg technology, google

33 Comments

Hipmunk Raises Money... And Is Immediately Threatened By Patent Troll

Patents

from the innovation-tax dept

Tue, Jul 10th 2012 11:44am — Mike Masnick

Hipmunk, if you're unfamiliar with it, is a wonderful travel search site, which really thought hard about how to make searching for flights and other travel info much more useful and intuitive. For me, personally, it's almost entirely replaced other sites like Expedia. A few weeks back the company announced on its blog that it had received $15 million in funding and also mentioned that it was doing okay in the revenue department. These days, that's both a sign for celebration... and blood in the water for patent trolls. I recently spoke to a lawyer for a decently large startup that isn't making any revenue, who has said that he's been contacted by patent trolls, who basically just keep circling, saying they won't sue until his company is making money, and then they'll pounce. It appears something similar happened with Hipmunk.

Just days after the announcement, a "company" (and I use that term loosely) called i2z contacted them, demanding they obtain a license, according to a report by Jeff Roberts. i2z is already suing a ton of travel/location companies, including Google, Travelocity, TripAdvisor, Yelp and more in Delaware (while not as famous as Eastern Texas for patent lawsuits, Delaware has been getting some attention as a "favorable" venue for patent trolls). It has also sued Hotels.com in a separate action... in Texas (northern district, not eastern) and Microsoft in Oregon. Of course, i2z (like so many patent trolls) appears to just be a patent lawyer, based in California: Rakesh Ramde.

The patent in question (5,345,551) covers a "Method and system for synchronization of simultaneous displays of related data sources." It was originally issued all the way back in 1994 to Brigham Young University... who held onto it until just about a year ago when it was assigned to "Gregory Cuke" who appears to be a real estate guy in Longview, Texas. And, yes, it turns out that i2z, despite actually being a lawyer in California, is technically based in Longview, Texas. Ramde claimed that Hipmunk violated claim one of the patent, which reads (in its entirety):

1. A system for synchronizing the presentation of data on a digital computer display, comprising:
first and second window-controlling means, each of said window-controlling means displaying information in at least one display window,
a synchronization control means, and
means for communications between said synchronization control means and each of said first and second window-controlling means;
wherein said first window-controlling means displays first information from a first source, and said second window-controlling means displays second information from a second source;
wherein said first information and said second information have sections, and at least one section of said second information corresponds to a section of said first information;
wherein said first window-controlling means sends a message to said synchronization control means over said means for communications indicating a change in viewing position to a new section of said first information;
wherein said synchronization control means sends a message to said second window-controlling means over said means for communications requesting a change in viewing position to a section of said second information corresponding to said new section of said first information; and
wherein said second window-controlling means displays said corresponding section of said second information on at least one display window.

In response, rather than letting i2z shop for its favorite forum, Hipmunk went to court in Northern California, asking for a declaratory judgment saying that (1) Hipmunk does not infringe and (2) the patent isn't valid anyway. On that first point, it seems that Hipmunk has a reasonably strong argument, since the whole point of the claim seems to involve multiple windows, and Hipmunk displays everything in a single window.

Either way, this is the kind of crap that tons of companies face. The second they're deemed even slightly successful, they get hit with patent infringement claims from non-practicing entities, wielding broad and vague patents that have nothing to do with what the company is really doing. And people still don't think this is a problem?

Filed Under: northern california, patent troll, travel
Companies: hipmunk, i2z

Intellectual Ventures Loses Its Shine: Will Its Business Model Ever Work?

Business Models

from the sad-troll dept

Thu, Jun 28th 2012 8:29pm — Glyn Moody

Techdirt has always been sceptical about Nathan Myhrvold's business plan for Intellectual Ventures (IV) -- build up a huge portfolio of patents, simply so that it can then license them to those that will, and sue those that won't. Others, however, have been dazzled by Myhrvold's pedigree as an extremely wealthy ex-Microsoft manager, and by the fact that patents have undeniably become a central concern for the tech industries in recent years, which suggests that there is plenty of money to be made from them.

But there are signs that the IV magic is fading. Here, for example, is a report of Myhrvold's appearance at D: All Things Digital this year, under the headline "Nathan Myhrvold on Being the Most Unpopular Guy at D10":

Myhrvold made the case to the crowd, though probably unsuccessfully, that his company serves a purpose similar to that of venture capital or private equity in the process of aiding innovation.

Myhrvold also quoted his own past statement at an earlier D conference, saying, "If people don’t find what you are doing threatening, then it is probably not very important."

More recently, the attacks have been less personal, but in some ways more damaging: Around 2008 Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s former chief technology officer, raised $2.9 billion in two separate funds to invest in patents and inventions. More than four years later, those funds have returned very little cash back to their investors and the returns look lousier than ever.
The article in Forbes quoted above goes on to describe one of Intellectual Venture's more recent patent-buying funds as "a complete disaster." It also notes IV's reply to these criticisms: the firm points out the answer is that the life cycle of the firm’s funds is longer than the ten-year period usually associated with private equity-type investments. The funds are linked to the 20-year lives of the patents the funds acquire or develop.
But there's a larger issue than what the real internal rate of return is, and that's the underlying viability of Myhrvold's model. There is no evidence that IV encourages innovation in any way, despite the company's claims that it "creates a market place" for patents.

Instead, it really seems no different from your common-or-garden troll, hoping to hit the jackpot by picking up a patent that a successful company later finds it simply must license or risk going out of business. Leaving aside the morality of such an approach, it's inherently risky: IV has to hope that enough other companies come up with the actual valuable innovations that its patents can then parasitize.

The comments above could be the first straws in the wind that business opinion is starting to turn against Myhrvold. It will be interesting to see if IV starts suing companies more aggressively in an attempt to get the money rolling in -- and what it does if that fails to deliver the kind of returns investors are presumably hoping for. That could well happen if those being sued sense that IV is under pressure, and decide as a result to opt for a long, hard -- and expensive -- fight in the courts to exploit that fact.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: all things digital, licensing, nathan myhrvold, patent troll
Companies: intellectual ventures

21 Comments

Patent Holder Sues Basically Anyone Who Offers Recipes Or 'Meal Planning' Online

Patents

from the damn dept

Fri, Jun 15th 2012 11:45am — Mike Masnick

THREsq alerted us to the news of a company named DietGoal, which appears to not exist for any reason other than to sue over patents, and which has sued the TV network Bravo for creating a recipe finder website. The claim is that it violates US Patent 6,585,516 for a "method and system for computerized visual behavior analysis, training, and planning." The patent basically seems to describe an online recipe database in which "the user can use the Picture Menus to choose meals for a particular time period to correspond to a customized eating plan."

I started to look further into the lawsuit, and I realized that Bravo was not the only target of DietGoal. Not by a long shot. Last September, right before the new patent law went into effect making it difficult to bundle defendants, DietGoal sued a ton of sites -- mainly focused on restaurants (including, but not limited to, Arby's, Chick-fil-A, Dairy Queen, Dunkin' Donuts, Jack in the Box, McDonald's, Panda Express, Taco Bell, Sonic, Wendy's, Burger King, Whole Foods, Tim Hortons, Dominos and Starbucks) as well as a few non-restaurants, including Weight Watchers, Google, IAC and Hearst Communications. If you look at the docket on that one, there are a ton of "dismissals" by DietGoal, which likely means that it was successful in getting the companies to pay up. Others do appear to be fighting it and hitting back with counterclaims and questioning the validity of the patent. Some, like Dominos and Wegmans also sought to break apart the case and make DietGoal face each defendant individually in different cases. That case has also bounced around among a few different judges already.

On April 3rd, DietGoals filed an amended complaint in that original case, attempting to add in a huge list of new defendants -- including Bravo and a bunch of others (many of whom we'll discuss in a bit). On May 24th, the magistrate judge denied DietGoal's motion to file that third amended complaint with all those other parties.

That brings us up to this week, in which DietGoal filed a bunch of lawsuits against a variety of companies (those it had tried to lump into this lawsuit) -- with each one being sued individually. So... yes, there's the lawsuit against Bravo, but also suits against AllRecipes.com, CalorieKing, ConAgra (for having a product nutrition search engine on its site -- no, I'm not kidding, check the complaint), General Mills, Nestle, Nutrisystem, Food.com, SparkPeople, Time, Inc. (for RealSimple.com), WebMD and some others as well.

Basically, it looks as though the DietGoal is operating under the premise that anyone who offers recipes online should have to pay it some money. Of course, all of this should make you wonder: was a patent really needed for the sake of encouraging companies to put databases of recipes online?

Filed Under: food, patent troll, recipes
Companies: dietgoal

39 Comments

Defensive Patent License: A Solution To Patent Problems... Or Just A Way To Highlight Them?

Patents

from the and-shouldn't-it-be-league dept

Wed, Jun 13th 2012 3:49pm — Mike Masnick

There have been a few unique ideas lately about ways for tech companies to try to "deal" with the explosion of innovation-hindering patent lawsuits against any company that's been marginally successful. For innovators, it's become something of a pandemic, so it's no surprise to see some experiments come about. A few months back, for example, Twitter got a lot of attention for its Innovator's Patent Agreement, which guarantees that any patent assigned by an employee to the company allows the original inventor an effective veto its offensive use. That is, an engineer (even after they leave Twitter, or even after a patent may have changed hands) can, independently of the patent holder, issue a no-fee license for the patent -- so the inventor can grant a license that gets others out of any patent dispute.

And while some other companies are considering using Twitter's IPA -- which it's released publicly for others to use -- it's still a single-company solution. One alternative that focused on a bunch of companies working together was Paul Graham's Patent Pledge which lets companies pledge that they won't use software patents against companies with less than 25 people. A bunch of startups have signed on. It's a nice idea, but the wrong target. The companies willing to sign such a pledge tend to be the ones who wouldn't use their patents offensively anyway.

This week, another potential option was announced too: the Defensive Patent Licence (DPL), which basically requires those who sign up to pledge all of their patents to be covered by the DPL. The way it works is any company that signs on to the DPL cannot assert its patents against any other DPL member. In some ways, it seems like the "L" in DPL would be better as "league" rather than license, since the key aspect is that anyone who does this is effectively in agreement with everyone else in the DPL.

Of course, there's a bit of game theory at work here. You might think that bigger companies would never join the DPL -- and to some extent that's clearly an issue. However, remember, that the big guys may want to avoid lawsuits from patents under the DPL too... but the only way to do so would be to join, at which point they'd have to effectively license all their patents to all other members.

Jason Schultz and Jennifer Urban, the professors responsible for putting this together, have an interesting research paper on the concept that's worth reading.

In many ways, this is an attempt to use the "benefits" of a system like, for example, Intellectual Ventures, without the soul-sucking evilness part. How well it works will very much depend on who takes part. Though, a big issue is that trolls will clearly stay out of it, and they remain one of the central problems with the patent system.

In the end, it seems like all these different ideas are really mostly useful for one key thing: highlighting the many, many, many ways in which current patent system is totally screwed up.

Filed Under: defensive patents, dpl, ipa, licensing, patent troll

15 Comments

Kodak's Legacy? Arms Dealer For The Patent Wars?

Patents

from the selling-off-the-pieces dept

Tue, Jun 12th 2012 9:01pm — Mike Masnick

As many people expected, Kodak has officially moved to sell off its patents to whoever can abuse them the most. Since the company is in bankruptcy, it needs permission to do this, but that's the easy part. These days, thanks to a totally broken patent and legal system, the patents are incredibly "valuable." Not because they represent any kind of actual innovation, but because they represent a magic tollbooth that lets the holder force other companies to pay. Of course, some of that magic wore off last month when the ITC noticed that one of Kodak's key patents -- one that it had used to score nearly a billion dollars in licensing revenue, was blatantly obvious and never should have been granted in the first place. Kodak claims it's going to appeal, but the patent sale will likely happen prior to any appeal going through. Either way, like other companies who failed to keep up with a changing market (hello, Nortel!), Kodak's final legacy may be supplying weapons to yet another battle in the era of technology patent nuclear war. It's not something to be proud of.

Filed Under: bankruptcy, itc, patent troll
Companies: kodak, nortel

16 Comments

Google Drive Barely Launched... And Google's Already Hit With Patent Infringement Lawsuit

Patents

from the but,-of-course dept

Thu, Jun 7th 2012 3:46pm — Mike Masnick

It's almost becoming a rule in the tech industry, that actually doing something that people want to use absolutely guarantees that you're going to get sued for patent infringement. It's pretty clear that the current patent system is acting as a massive tax/tollbooth on innovation. The latest in a long line of examples: just as Google has been rolling out its Google Drive offering to users, it's been hit with a patent infringement lawsuit from a company with a patent (5,918,244) that covers a "method and system for coherently caching I/O devices across a network." As the lawsuit notes, the technology behind the patent is to enable the ability of "multiple computers [to] all communicate with each other and... all access data from the same data storage device or devices, such as hard disk." Basically, the patent describes a system of RAM caching. Because I'm sure no one ever would have figured out how to do that without the patent system... So, rather than just allowing the technology to progress in the market as new products are developed, we're left with legal fights and a tollbooth on innovation.

Filed Under: caching, google drive, patent troll
Companies: google

Oracle Sues To Stop Lodsys Patent Trolling

Patents

from the oh-irony dept

Wed, Jun 6th 2012 7:15am — Mike Masnick

Oracle apparently has no sense of irony when it comes to patents. The day after a judge issued a complete smackdown in Oracle's "big" patent and copyright lawsuit against Google, Oracle has suddenly decided that it doesn't like patent bullies. Well, as long as the bully isn't Oracle. It filed its own case against Lodsys -- the quite infamous patent troll that has been threatening and suing tons of companies for daring to do in-app payments. Apparently, Lodsys has targeted Oracle customers and the company has had enough. It's actually good to see more tech companies fight back against Lodsys, but it does seem a bit odd on the timing for Oracle, given its over-emphasis on the importance of not violating patents in the earlier case.

Filed Under: apps, irony, patent troll
Companies: lodsys, oracle

Shouldn't We See It As A Problem When Patents Are The Product Itself?

Patents

from the just-basic-common-sense-here... dept

Tue, Jun 5th 2012 9:20am — Mike Masnick

Forbes has given some space to Alan Minsk, a patent lawyer who was in-house patent counsel for Openwave -- a company that we recently noted had decided to become a patent troll after failing in the marketplace -- as well as with Intellectual Ventures, perhaps the world's largest patent troll. In his column, he talks up how simply wonderful it is that companies have realized that patents aren't just about protecting products, but have become key products themselves. He seems positively gleeful at the idea of writing patents so broad that they cover entirely unrelated industries:

My own approach was to identify potentially patentable innovations (i.e., those that were not clearly unpatentable) that had a well-defined strategic value proposition, and then proceeding to seek patent protection for a broad-based interpretation of the underlying concept of those innovations.

Since many innovations represent a solution to a technical problem, this approach often involved determining other industries (or other situations within the same industry) in which a similar problem arose, and then generalizing the description of the innovation so that it could be used in those other industries or situations. This typically required developing a description of the underlying concept of the innovation in generic functional terms instead of implementation specific terms (a process I termed “functional deconstruction.”)

And, because the strategic value propositions (or use cases) for a patent often changed as a company developed and competed with others, my approach was an iterative one that was re-visited regularly in case a decision that was appropriate at one time was no longer appropriate because of new information. This applied both to patent application filing decisions and to those made during negotiations with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as part of the process of obtaining a patent.

In other words, not only did he try to patent things as broadly as possible to cover other industries, he would regularly try to broaden the patent as the market changed, even though the application was already ongoing. The whole thing seems to be bragging about the exact process of how to destroy competition and innovation in a market by locking it up in some vague piece of paper.

If we are to believe that the patent system was designed to "promote the progress" then it needs to be admitted that patents are never an end, but always a means -- a means to develop actual products that genuinely represent progress. And yet, that's not what they've been for quite some time, and it's highlighted by the idea that they should ever be considered primary products in and of themselves. That's a sign of a totally broken system. It may be one where patent lawyers like Minsk make out nicely, but it shows a failure of the system as a whole -- and when that happens we have a system that hinders, rather than aids, innovation.

Filed Under: alan minsk, patent troll, promote the progress
Companies: intellectual ventures, openwave

65 Comments

Cisco Has Enough Of TiVo Patent Claims, Files To Invalidate TiVo Patents

Patents

from the offensively-defensive dept

Mon, Jun 4th 2012 5:03am — Mike Masnick

Over the past few years, as competition in the DVR market has become tougher, TiVo has become more and more reliant on using its patents to stop competition and innovation, rather than focusing on competing in the marketplace. its most famous case was the one against EchoStar, which even included TiVo buying a bull (literally) in Eastern Texas, where the district court case was heard. While it won at the district court level, during the appeals process, the Patent Office suddenly indicated that the patents might not be so solid. Not long after that, TiVo and EchoStar worked out a settlement.

TiVo found the process so enjoyable that it apparently started thinking about a second career as a patent troll -- and has already sued Verizon and Motorola. Not surprisingly, it's been pushing some others to license some patents... and at least one large player has had enough. Cisco, owners of Scientific Atlanta, a maker of settop boxes and DVRs, has filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate four TiVo patents -- or, if the patents are found valid, a declaratory judgment that it does not infringe.

Of course, by filing first, Cisco was also able to file the case in San Jose, rather than letting TiVo try to get the case into Texas (despite the fact that both Cisco and Tivo are located not far from each other in Northern California). As far as I know, TiVo has not purchased a bull in San Jose.

Filed Under: dvr, eastern texas, patent troll, uspto
Companies: cisco, echostar, motorola, tivo, verizon

39 Comments

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Google Sued For Patent Infringement For Mobile Chrome

from the of-course dept

Hipmunk Raises Money... And Is Immediately Threatened By Patent Troll

from the innovation-tax dept

Intellectual Ventures Loses Its Shine: Will Its Business Model Ever Work?

from the sad-troll dept

Patent Holder Sues Basically Anyone Who Offers Recipes Or 'Meal Planning' Online

from the damn dept

Defensive Patent License: A Solution To Patent Problems... Or Just A Way To Highlight Them?

from the and-shouldn't-it-be-league dept

Kodak's Legacy? Arms Dealer For The Patent Wars?

from the selling-off-the-pieces dept

Google Drive Barely Launched... And Google's Already Hit With Patent Infringement Lawsuit

from the but,-of-course dept

Oracle Sues To Stop Lodsys Patent Trolling

from the oh-irony dept

Shouldn't We See It As A Problem When Patents Are The Product Itself?

from the just-basic-common-sense-here... dept

Cisco Has Enough Of TiVo Patent Claims, Files To Invalidate TiVo Patents

from the offensively-defensive dept

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