Patent troll Lodsys now after apps with 'More Apps' links

http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=100387

by modmax • 15 years ago

141 64 15 years ago

forums.toucharcade.com

modmax2• 15 years ago

How is something this vague "directed to systems and methods for providers of products and/or services to interact with users of those products and services to gather information from those users and transmit that information to the provider" patentable?!

Hemospectrum• 15 years ago

It involves a computer -- and the examiners employed by the PTO just don't have the time or training to properly understand computer patents. That's the only explanation.

If examiners can't figure out whether something is patentable, they err on the side of good faith on the part of the applicant, and leave the question to the courts.

jamesbritt• 15 years ago

It involves a computer -- and the examiners employed by the PTO just don't have the time or training to properly understand computer patents. That's the only explanation.

That's the only explanation? Doubtful.

I know someone at the patent office, an examiner who handles tech patents. When I asked about certain patents she explained that you need to look at the complete patent application and the specific behavior or items in the claim. Titles are often very broad for convenience. Also, patent applications tend to start broad and go narrow, with the overly broad requests (usually) denied.

If examiners can't figure out whether something is patentable, they err on the side of good faith on the part of the applicant, and leave the question to the courts.

Where did you get this information from?

As it was explained to me if a patent is not clear or what is being claimed not readily understood by the examiner then it gets sent back for revision. There does not appear to be any "good faith" involved.

Some patent holders like to claim that one of their narrowly defined patents applies to much broader behavior, and then threaten people with legal action. In this case it is quite possible for a non-tech judge to decide that a patent applies to things it really shouldn't.

I don't doubt there are bullshit patents or that some patent examiners aren't as educated as they should be, but I also don't see any reason to think the examiners are just so harried and untrained that they just shrug their shoulders and assume everything is legit.

There are two problems with the current patent system. One is that patents are granted where they shouldn't be. The other is that legitimate patents on specific, narrow, precise items or behavior are later used to extort money from people because untrained lawyers and judges will decide that a very narrow patent should, incorrectly, apply to more broader cases.

snorkel• 15 years ago

So if a service provider (a restaurant) uses their service (waiters) to gather information from users of that service (waiters get food orders from customers) and transmit that information to the provider (waiter brings orders back to the kitchen) then wow ... they patented waiting on a customer!!! What a novel concept!!

monochromatic• 15 years ago

That's just the title. The claims are what get examined for patentability.

barrettcolin• 15 years ago

This isn't new news if you've been following this business since the start: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2552563

pr0filer_• 15 years ago

Silly patents. TIL it's possible to patent cross-selling methods.

chrislomax3• 15 years ago

This annoys me because it is scaring off people from developing for smart phones. This patent is so vague that even if I did know every patent ever made then I would not even associate it with what patent he is claiming he has violated.

Bring back Lulzsec for a day, get them to hack their systems and delete all their patents.

I wouldn't be surprised if they had a patent for people communicating over the internet and we are all about to be sued.

modmax2• 15 years ago

Indeed.. this is a case where hackers can do some real good and make the world a better place

cydonian_monk• 15 years ago

Not just SmartPhones. This kind of insanity makes me question whether I should write another line of code for anything.

cageface2• 15 years ago

Indeed. Opening a bar instead is looking better all the time.

ltamake• 15 years ago

> Bring back Lulzsec for a day, get them to hack their systems and delete all their patents.

Well, we just need to abolish patents in general. They just create reason for these patent trolls to do what they do (scam us developers) and they are extremely flawed in nature.

chrislomax3• 15 years ago

I think some patents really do serve a purpose though and in some respects they are completely right to be granted. I think if someone is truely inovative in what they invent then they should be granted the patent. It's when people come along and patent really stupid stuff.

I remember a company filing a law suit against twitter once because they had patented the method of posting short status updates in the case of emergency (or something like that) and they tried to sue Twitter??!!?! I understand the patent and how it is applied to Twitter in general but seriously, who allowed that patent to pass??

I find Amazons "One Click" purchase patent stupid.

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

> Bring back Lulzsec for a day, get them to hack their systems and delete all their patents.

They'd have to actually attack the patent office, wouldn't they? Not to mention, I imagine that both the PO and Lodsys probably keep multiple redundant backups, digital and dead-tree.

chrislomax3• 15 years ago

I would imagine you are right, I think the point I was making more was to annoy them as much as they annoy us. Causing inconvenience to them would be the ultimate goal

dralison• 15 years ago

What someone needs to do is get a business process patent on "Patent Trolling".

oneplusone• 15 years ago

IBM has got that covered: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...

cruise02• 15 years ago

Nice. They beat Haliburton by a full year. http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Se...

ntkachov• 15 years ago

Unfortunately i think the Blisky ruling kinda killed this one.

eru2• 15 years ago

I thought you could not patent a business process?

samyzee2• 15 years ago

why m i not surprised IBM came up with that

samyzee2• 15 years ago

if i was you,i'd honorably ask mr.snodgrass to eat shit and die!

dstein3• 15 years ago

The only difference between Lodsys and large software/hardware companies like Microsoft and Oracle is the size of their litigation targets.

I'm beyond convinced that the entire software patent systems needs to be abolished.

lambersley• 15 years ago

It seems companies (large or small) are all afraid that someone may take their once 'decent' idea, perfect it and make a better product. Can you imagine the anarchy that would ensue if companies were forced to be innovative? They'd run the risk of losing customers who are frustrated with their stale solutions/products. We just can't have that. Ludicrous, this idea you suggest!

powertower• 15 years ago

My understanding is that Microsoft hates software patents (at least when BillG was CEO), has only registered them out of necessity, has historically only sued relatively few other companies, and only done so with either real patents (non-obvious, read beyond the patent title) or as a retaliation of being sued itself. I’m sure there are a few exceptions here as there are always.

dstein3• 15 years ago

They aren't suing every Android OEM out of necessity. Microsoft has converted to patent troll in lieu of innovating in the mobile space.

mikeryan• 15 years ago

I find this hard to believe. It may have been their MO in the very early days but they later started building one of the largest patent portfolios in the world and their CTO went on to become one of the largest patent trolls in the world.

meow• 15 years ago

Their outlook on using their patent portfolio has changed in these past few years. As their reputation for innovation goes down, their reputation for trolling is going up.I guess trolling is inversely proportional to innovation after all.

yuhong• 15 years ago

Amazon is a famous example of this. Search for "Amazon patent" on Slashdot for some history.

cube133• 15 years ago

>The only difference between Lodsys and large software/hardware companies like Microsoft and Oracle is the size of their litigation targets.

And the fact that MS and Oracle actually make products.

Tyrannosaurs• 15 years ago

And the fact that so far Lodsys's patents seem to be things which are very obvious and therefore very questionable which isn't true of all patents.

smokeyj• 15 years ago

I wonder what would happen if government became a result oriented organization. If the point of patents is to increase innovation, shouldn't you be able to measure innovation? And if you can't measure the impact of patents on innovation, what evidence is their to justify monopolizing ideas? If you can't measure and observe, then what's the evidence? I would say there is none, it's entirely subjective. Unconditional support for actions regardless of consequence is a bit religious to me, and there used to be separation of church and state.. but I guess that can't really be measured, can it?

aristus• 15 years ago

It's not religion. You are using a different (and objectively better) standard of proof. But it's literally a billion times easier to measure things like that than it was 240 years ago, when all math was done by hand and the fastest communication was by horse.

You, as a citizen, can demand results and proof. That's how any human institution evolves. Grumping on the internet about how stupid everyone is because things aren't done the way you want will not produce measurable results.

pmr_• 15 years ago

More patents means more innovation, right? Because more innovative ideas have been protected, right?

So, I bet they actually do measure. Just not the way any sane person would expect. But this is what always happens if a happens if you try to run something, that is hard or impossible to measure, "economically". You revert to one of the things you can trivially count and claim that more (or less) is better. If you are one of the smart ones you dabble with relative and not absolute numbers. This is especially true for political or public institutions without any goal above "accounting of men and things" because it just doesn't matter any more to them.

davesims• 15 years ago

I was in DC yesterday, walking by the patent office and saw this quote from Lincoln over the door: "The Patent Office adds the flame of interest to the light of creativity"

I wonder what Lincoln would think of Lodsys.

thought_alarm• 15 years ago

My question is, if you just provide an external "Buy Me" or "More Apps" link to the App Store you would have no idea who or how many people actually use that link, and of those who use the link you would have no idea what they did once they got to the store. They could buy someone else's app, they could browse some more, they could leave a comment.

So how does that qualify as a "survey" in Lodsys's eyes?

shaggyfrog• 15 years ago

I have a feeling that Lodsys will continue to iterate on this theme until they get shut down. Given they have signed a licensing agreement, I'm not sure what Apple can do, but they should take as active as a role as they can from here on out. It certainly raises doubts in my mind as to what kind of "buy this app" link I can put, if anything, in any apps for myself or my clients.

mattmcmanus• 15 years ago

Where are all of the internet's vigilante hackers when it comes to things like this?

stcredzero3• 15 years ago

Lodsys might actually be an easier target than a large company.

jamesu• 15 years ago

I was planning on developing a few paid apps to test the market over the next few months, but this combined with the other mobile patent lawsuits has made me seriously reconsider it.

It's a pity the app store servers reside in the US. Otherwise i wouldn't have to worry about these things!

cageface2• 15 years ago

You're not really any safer building any other kind of software, although you may be subject to less patent troll scrutiny with a web app or something.

sdizdar• 15 years ago

The things what Lodsys is doing right now is actually very good. There are more copy-cat trolls coming to the market based on the same idea "buy some patents and let sue many private proprietors and ask them $1000 to drop suite".

Eventually, it will be obvious even to our representatives in Washington that something is broken and they will be forced to fix it.

As they say, our representatives will try doing the right thing but only after they try all the wrong things first.

stcredzero3• 15 years ago

So then, there is an important free market niche for "douchebags who are smart enough to exploit X, but too stupid and greedy to avoid outraging the wrong people."

rockarage2• 15 years ago

It seems Lodsys was able to successfully patent the hyperlink, U.S. patent system has some serious problems. Patent trolling is not the only problem, the patent office granting patents, where the is no merit, is another big problem.

dave1619• 15 years ago

I'm not a lawyer, but I did read through all four of their patents. There's no way Lodsys can claim patenting the hyperlink. It's ridiculous.

rockarage2• 15 years ago

yeah, but that's what they are claiming, the app has a link to another app and they want to sue over that. There is not in app purchase.

cubicle67• 15 years ago

Remember Vuestar? They seemed to have managed to patent a hyperlinked image

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuestar_Technologies

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/patent-troll...

zentechen2• 15 years ago

Patent law reform is a must.

zentechen2• 15 years ago

What did Lodsys get that patent in the first place!? Who were the idiots that approved the patent?

BenoitEssiambre• 15 years ago

The act of writing software can be summarized as generating ideas and writing down these ideas in a language computers can understand and execute. Software programmers are in the business of writing ideas all day. This combined with the fact that the bar for ideas being patentable is very low means that programmers probably generate and write down multiple patentable ideas per day. From the get go they are inevitably setting up a huge patent minefield.

I don’t know if anyone has ever calculated the average density of patentable ideas in code, but if you consider, for example, that performing an online transaction with the last entered customer data (the infamous 1-Click patent) is patentable, I would very roughly estimate that there is a patentable idea every 20 to 50 lines of code. As an example, the Linux kernel (just the very core of Linux) contains more that 10 millions lines of code. If you consider a complete Linux distribution (by adding the graphical user interface and a bunch of utilities) you get at least ten times that amount, that is more than 100 millions lines of code. Using the rough estimate above, we can calculate that there are more than 2 millions patentable ideas in a consumer operating system. That is an incredible amount of complexity. In fact, it is a testament to human ingenuity that we can (sometimes) get all this code to work together.

Now code is not used side by side like an infantry of little computer processes working in parallel to make computers or phones go. It is rather organised and packaged in a huge network of building blocks, a pyramid of hundreds of thousands of libraries, APIs or functions heavily inter-dependent on each other. What’s more, the building blocks are usually not all written by the same people or organisations and their consistent and stable behavior is critical for enabling compatibility (remember, often between millions of parts made by thousands of developers).

This hierarchical and networked architecture is inevitable and the best way to organise complex information, however the stability it requires at the bottom of the pyramid means that some building blocks cannot be changed once the pyramid is built. Someone claiming ownership of the shape of a bottom block after the pyramid is built, someone having the power to force a bottom block to be removed and replaced with a different shaped one, no matter how simple and obvious this bloc is, does not have power over just this block but over the whole structure above it and all the components that depend on it. This means patent holders have a disproportionately large amount of power when they target such a bloc. They know that changing it would require tearing down, redesigning and replacing often thousands of dependent projects and probably break compatibility for millions of users of these projects. It is usually simply not an option.

smashing• 15 years ago

Is there any business model which can limit the damages from a patent troll?

Patent troll Lodsys now after apps with 'More Apps' links

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