Google Reexam Requests Devastating to Lodsys

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110817200754569

by grellas • 15 years ago

181 65 15 years ago

sp332• 15 years ago

I was afraid that Groklaw wouldn't be any good now that PJ isn't heading it up anymore, but I really shouldn't have worried. Still informed, insightful, opinionated, and funny.

arron61• 15 years ago

I wish they will do more so every news piece will stop quoting the terrible Florian Muller

othermaciej5• 15 years ago

Florian Muller seems to have a much better track record of accurate predictions about what will actually happen in patent cases than Groklaw. And he seems to be better at reporting the facts dispassionately. Groklaw seems to focus more on cheerleading for entities they favor (Linux, IBM, Google) and against ones they hate (Sun, Microsoft).

I really don't understand why so many people seem to think they are better than Muller, other than perhaps because they enjoy being told what they wanted to hear regardless of truth.

anigbrowl6• 15 years ago

From the comments: Taking a weapon that is susceptible to a search for prior art, up against a company that specializes in search is a bad plan.

Hah. Wonder if Lodsys will sue their lawyers?

monochromatic4• 15 years ago

For what?

anigbrowl6• 15 years ago

Not checking for prior art when filing the patent application. Sorry, I guess my comment above looked like I was talking about the current litigation.

jonknee5• 15 years ago

Lodsys is their lawyers. It's not a real company. It's a patent attorney who registered a company specifically as a vehicle to monetize the four patents they purchased/licensed from Intellectual Ventures.

monochromatic4• 15 years ago

... sounds like a real company to me. Do you mean they don't produce anything? None of the patent troll companies do.

anigbrowl6• 15 years ago

Yes, sorry. I was thinking of Dan Abelow, the original 'inventor' ( http://computing2.com/) but on reflection, he's already got his license fee so I suppose he has no reason to care.

billybob2• 15 years ago

TL;DR: "Most reexamination requests rely on a finding of obviousness, which is a far more subject[ive] standard than demonstrating a lack of novelty. A lack of novelty can be established by any one piece of prior art that discloses each of the key elements of claimed invention. In each of these cases Google has identified not one, but five separate pieces of prior art that each alone demonstrates a lack of novelty in the critical Lodsys claims."

billybob2• 15 years ago

If this is true, surely the judge will ask: if each of these claims can be invalidated by five separate pieces of prior art, why in the world were the patents granted in the first place?

magicalist2• 15 years ago

aren't like 80% of patents invalidated on reexamination? (which is, of course, significantly different than 80% of patents being invalid)

the judges are probably pretty used to crappy patents.

MatthewPhillips• 15 years ago

The prior art is in relation to Lodsys' claims. Remember that patent trolls use their patents as moving goalposts. What the patent office grants and what the patent troll claims they own are not necessarily the same.

joelhaus2• 15 years ago

The answer would surely be: Google has far greater access to organized/relevant information than the patent office (or any other entity) has ever had in the past...

I wonder how effective this will be in fending off the patent trolls (e.g. IV), probably not very ...unless... Washington could implement/regulate a streamlined method of invalidating patents with prior art, it could go a long way in protecting valid inventions, while creating a disincentive for firms filing frivolous lawsuits and patents.

I know the patent office is under-staffed/funded but, you've got to believe that far fewer patents would be filed if there was a more effective system for invalidation in place.

anigbrowl6• 15 years ago

Equally interesting is that one of Lodsys's targets is seeking discovery in Arizona of whether Lodsys is a cat's paw of Intellectual Ventures: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=201108171318536

praptak2• 15 years ago

It is sad that you even need to 'seek discovery' to check such things. Why is it even possible to do business anonymously?

sneak• 15 years ago

Why shouldn't it be? Private enterprise is private.

mrich• 15 years ago

What I do not understand: Google and Apple are both investors to Intellectual Ventures. So the dog is biting its own tail quite horrendously here.

msg• 15 years ago

Hedging?

Nothing requires their company to be ideologues against patents.

(except for "Don't be evil")

-- signed, an EFF member

joebadmo2• 15 years ago

Intellectual Ventures started as a sort of patent pool for small inventors, at least purportedly. The idea was, as a small inventor, you could pay IV or, I think, contribute patents, or some combination of both, and IV would protect you from patent litigation. They only recently started suing people through shell companies. I'm pretty sure most of those companies invested in IV before it started trolling, but I'm having trouble looking up the info. I'll edit later if I find anything.

mvelie• 15 years ago

Intellectual Ventures has way more than these couple patents. Google/Apple's user base is more important than these couple patents. They only have them to protect themselves, not to assert them, so invalidating them won't do anything.

psn• 15 years ago

I suspect that as a result of some out of court settlement with Intellectual Ventures, people are asked to invest. I also suspect that the best lawyers in the world - and apple and google have the best in the world - pick the fights they have a chance of winning. A similar example is http://www.iwf.org.uk/.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

This is a nice piece of work. And it is refreshing to see Google jump in here. When I saw they paid $12.5B for the Motorola patents I wondered why, if they were willing to play at that level, they couldn't set aside 200 - 300M for a bunch of greybeards and IP lawyers to sit around dissecting the patent database, every journal article ever printed, etc and just obliterate a crap ton of the stupid patents.

Now an evil company would say "Ok, we can invalidate half your portfolio, or you can give us a free license to anything you've patented and we'll look the other way, which will it be?"

Few companies could pull off such a strategy.

jonknee5• 15 years ago

It's quite possible that Google realized Motorola had some non-stupid patents. Motorola has been in the mobile space a long time (from the first cell phone) and has done tons of innovation.

Steko• 15 years ago

A lot of the speculation re: Lodsys was that the license Apple et al had from IV for these patents prevented them from contesting the validity of the patents (standard language apparently).

So what's great here is Google either confirms that this is not the case or that they found a way around it or are ignoring it.

tokenadult• 15 years ago

Google Scholar

http://scholar.google.com/

has long had an interface for searching patents, and here we see one example of an application of full-text searching of patent filings. Part of what has made patent law an arcane subfield of law has been the tedious reference work necessary to look up what has already been patented. If Google fulfills its mission of organizing the world's information, patent law will become clearer--perhaps clearly ridiculous in more than a few cases--and at length patent litigation will play less of a role in impeding technical innovation. Technology for the win.

melling• 15 years ago

Someone should create a database of all similar patents that are granted so it's easier to prove that other patents are invalid because they are equivalent to the ones found to be invalid, essentially disarming them.

dpcan• 15 years ago

Someone did.

Listen to the "When Patents Attack" podcast: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w...

Someone created a system where they can enter a claim and go back and see how many times that claim was already granted in a patent. The one they looked up found something like 5000+ prior claims.

Why the USPTO doesn't use this software before approving patents is beyond me.

pyre• 15 years ago

Companies pay money for patents. Granting less patents means less money. Pure and simple.

BenoitEssiambre• 15 years ago

The question is: How much did it cost for this defense? Would a small player without outside help have a good chance of reproducing this positive outcome in the face of a patent holder in the wrong like in this Lodsys case?

Otherwise this outcome doesn't do much to quell my anxiety as a small entrepreneur.

lukejduncan2• 15 years ago

What kind of resources would it take to attempt to invalidate as many of IV's patent's as possible? Is that something that could be crowd-sourced or does it require significant capital?

sunchild3• 15 years ago

Doing the research for prior art seems like a great project for crowd sourcing. The lawsuits could be brought by big corporate stakeholders based on that research.

sunchild3• 15 years ago

Been thinking more about this: With http://www.google.com/patents, a collective should be able to prepare detailed research on prior art for all kinds of obnoxious software patents. That research could be neatly packaged and ready to go when the trolls come sniffing.

Google Reexam Requests Devastating to Lodsys

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