Given the inanity that is our current patent system, it's not surprising that innocent patent holders can look like trolls. Such might well be the case with SightSound Technologies, a subsidiary of General Electric, which has spent years in patent lawsuits with Apple, CDNow, Bertelsmann, Napster and others. As SightSound's...
Samsung has won another victory in its long-running patent war with Apple. A new judgement bars Apple from importing certain last-generation iPads and iPhones to the United States. The win, however, is unlikely to amount to much more than a moral victory - while serving to highlight how meaningless these courtroom...
It's official: patent litigation is a fool's game. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the past few years of patent litigation in the mobile industry have yielded participants very little, as courts have swatted down suits on the basis of prior art, obviousness of the technology or other reasons....
If you believe companies formed to litigate patent suits aren't worth a lick of spit, then meet the new Dr. Evil: CopyTele Inc. (CTI), which sued Microsoft on Wednesday over encryption technologies used in Skype.But to Rob Berman, the company's chief executive officer, CTI is actually standing up for the...
Ditto is a 15-person eyewear startup that utilizes remarkable software — a 3D modeling system that replicates the buyer's face — to let customers try on glasses virtually before purchasing them. Unfortunately for Ditto, its innovative software has put the company in the crosshairs of Glasses.com. Glasses.com is owned by 1-800 Contacts, a much...
Google's pledge to back open patents is a typically Google gesture: an elegant combination of genuine altruism, PR spin and protecting its own self-interests.Thursday morning, Google outlined the Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge, which boils down to one statement: "we pledge not to sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source...
Guest author Don Marti is a technical marketing manager at Perforce, and a Git user since 2007.Key parts of the America Invents Act (AIA), which passed in 2011, came into effect on March 16, 2013. These changes in U.S. patent law can help all companies that use software to protect...
In an effort to chase patent trolls back under their bridges, two congressmen last week reintroduced a bill they call SHIELD — a laborious acronym that stands for Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes. While the bill went nowhere in the last Congress, the timing seems pretty good now,...
Facebook is no stranger to being sued, but a new lawsuit filed against the company this month might be the weirdest to date. As of February 5, Facebook is being sued by deceased Dutch programmer and apparent social web pioneer Joannes Jozef Everardus Van Der Meer, who passed away in 2004...
One small developer says that he's readied an open-source alternative to Microsoft's exFAT file system, providing companies and individuals with a free alternative to Microsoft's file system for flash drives.Over the weekend, developer Andrew Nayenko announced fuse-exFAT 1.0.0, completing three years of development on the project. Tarball archives have been posted...
On the Internet, nobody really likes to be called a troll. Especially the people who absolutely know they are trolls. It is a derogatory term meant to denigrate somebody who is deliberately provocative to produce the maximum amount of disruption to other parties' goals. We think of trolls as people...
This time it's the so-called "pinch and zoom" patent getting rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and this is a big deal since that patent was one that Apple used to achieve that huge $1 billion verdict against Samsung in a California kangaroo court last summer.Now what...
Here's something to not be proud of: 61% of all patent lawsuits filed in the U.S. in 2012 (up to Dec. 1) were brought by non-practicing entities. Or, as we like to call them in the media, patent trolls. This percentage is pretty depressing, since it's up from 29% of 2010...
The news: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has declared a huge Apple multi-touch-screen patent - the so-called "Steve Jobs patent" - to be invalid. As CNET adds, this is the second Apple patent to get a smackdown. The previous one was about Apple's "rubber band" effect. Neither ruling is...
The judge that presided over the Trial Of The Century patent dispute between Apple and Samsung is now calling for global patent peace between the two companies.There is more than a touch of irony in this request.Judge Lucy Koh was the judge that played referee between Apple and Samsung earlier...
Good news for Holiday shoppers -- Microsoft's Xbox game console will continue to appear on store shelves.Judge James Robart, a federal judge based in Seattle, ruled (PDF) late last week that Microsoft owes Motorola some sort of royalty for the patents it owns covering 802.11 Wi-Fi technology and H.264 video codecs,...
Patents make sense in some industries. When it costs a billion dollars to develop a new pharmaceutical, a company needs protection during that process to make it worth the risk of trying.But software doesn't have that overhead. Too often, software patents just end up making the incumbents complacent and discourage...
Among a certain class of shutterbugs, there's a whole new genre called "camera toss" photography. Nikon knows about the phenomenon, apparently, because last week a patent from the company was published that shows how it's planning to build this feature into a new kind of camera.What Is Camera Tossing?Camera toss...
Microsoft took a step toward creating - and owning - the Star Trek holodeck this week via a patent application that introduces the concept of a “peripheral display” that can project game scenes onto the walls, ceiling and floors of a room.The idea, according to patent application number 20120223885, is...
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issues the week’s new patents every Tuesday. A quick check of what some big techn companies scored this week offers a telling glimpse of their varying fortunes.This week’s patent score:Google: 27Microsoft: 42Apple: 18Facebook: 0Let’s take a closer look at some of the...
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