Patent Troll Sues Apple, Dell, HP, 21 Others Over Automation
It is a plot that we see several times every week.
An old patent gets snapped up by someone who creates a company around it and sues a bunch of easy targets to extract license fees in the hope that their potential victims want to avoid perhaps even higher fees following a court ruling. This here is one remarkable example.
A company called Data Carriers is suing 24 tech companies, including Apple, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, RIM, Nokia, Nintendo, Motorola, LG, Lenovo, HP, Dell and Asus over a patent that is entitled "Proactive presentation of automating features to a computer user." That may sound very general in its nature and is, in fact, a rather complex description of what we find to be common sense today: The patent describes the idea that a an application is able to record a certain usage of an application to provide a feature that would provide an automated execution feature later on. You could consider it a patent that covers all context-sensitive aspects of applications today. Every time a software reacts to user input with the suggestions of some automation feature, this patent could potentially be infringed. A prime example would be Microsoft's ribbon menu bar. Interestingly, Microsoft is not among those being sued at this time.
The patent was originally filed in 1992 by Symantec and was awarded to the company in 1995. For unknown reasons, the patents was acquired by Data Carriers, a Dover, Delaware-based company with no history on March 16, 2012. Four days later, Data Carriers filed 24 patent infringement lawsuits. In the case of Apple, the plaintiff claims that the "iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, iTunes, Macbook, desktops, Safari, iOS, and OS X, and various versions thereof, and www.apple.com" are violating the patent. Sony apparently infringes the patent with products such as "laptops, desktops, smartphones, tablets, Playstation, Playstation Store and software loaded onto and used on such devices". HP is affected with its entire client PC product line, including "laptops, desktops, tablets", the suit claims.
It is interesting to note that Data Carriers is not asking the court for an injunction. It simply wants its victims to pay "its damages, costs, expenses, and prejudgment and post-judgment interest".
Patents do have a sell by date. That's the whole point of patents. Otherwise they would create indefinite monopolies.
I think patent duration is 20 years from the day of the first filing in most countries these days. Way too long for some of the bullshit that can be patented these days.
I'm certain that someone forgot to patent that one...
/sarcasm
Patents do have a sell by date. That's the whole point of patents. Otherwise they would create indefinite monopolies.
I think patent duration is 20 years from the day of the first filing in most countries these days. Way too long for some of the bullshit that can be patented these days.
Patents that were issued need a short expire date and the new system needs international agreement. It does need to be restarted and on an even playing field so that products made in one country aren't able to avoid the costs of licenses in another.
I'm certain that someone forgot to patent that one...
/sarcasm
It would be the best thing that could happen for innovation!
Only the patent lawyers would be the real losers.
Wait - better trademark that one before someone comes after me...
An Aussie beat you to it.
Anyone else ever use the "Record Macro" feature in MS Excel back in like 1990? I suspect that's why MSFT wasn't named. It isn't just an interpretation of the patent to a set of features. It is the very description given in this article.
Anyone?