This month, we feature another yet another patent that takes an ordinary business practice and does it on a computer. Our winner is US Patent No. 8,738,435, titled “Method and apparatus for presenting personalized content relating to offered products and services.” As you might guess from its title, the patent claims the idea of sending a personalized marketing message using a computer.
Source: Stupid Patent of the Month: Phoenix Licensing Trolls Marketers | Electronic Frontier Foundation
A US district court has torn the heart out of two patents wielded by Intellectual Ventures against two antivirus makers.
In a judgment this week, Chief Judge Leonard Stark ruled that Intellectual Ventures’ US patents 6,460,050 and 6,073,142 were “ineligible,” meaning they are too vague and the technologies they described unpatentable.
The ‘142 and ‘050 patents described email filters designed to catch spam and malware. A third Intellectual Ventures patent, 5,987,610, which described “computer virus screening methods and systems”, was upheld by the judge.
The three patents were brought before the Delaware district court for scrutiny by Symantec and Trend Micro after they were sued by Intellectual Ventures for alleged patent infringement. The antivirus pair wanted the patents torn up so they could undo Intellectual Ventures’ case against them.
“Trend has firmly believed that Intellectual Ventures’ case has been based on over-broad construction of invalid patents since it was targeted by IV in 2010, and we are appreciative of today’s vindication on the validity issue,” Trend Micro’s general counsel Felix Sterling said in a statement passed to El Reg.
In a Thursday court filing, Intellectual Ventures agreed to abandon its legal action against Trend, though the two sides were at odds over how their court costs should be split.
As for Symantec, Intellectual Ventures has already won a $17m patent-infringement judgment against the California-based biz: $9m of of that was down to the ‘142 patent.
The ruling may be welcome news for those seeking patent reform and the elimination of “patent trolls” that acquire patents and sue companies for alleged violations. Groups such as the EFF have condemned Intellectual Ventures as one of the worst patent troll offenders. Even populist TV funnyman John Oliver has taken a pop at patents…
The worst patent trolls bring weak cases and use the cost of defending a lawsuit as leverage to force settlements. A company called Joao Bock Transaction Systems LLC (“JBTS”) has elevated this business model to an art form. The company is associated with patent attorney and prolific “inventor” Raymond Joao. Apparently not content with drafting patents on behalf of others, Joao began to file his own patents. His companies have since launched dozens of lawsuits against technology ranging from streaming video to financial transactions. Of course, if you talk to the people who actually pioneered real-world technology, they’ve never heard of Joao or his companies. From all indications, Joao is solely in business of filing paper patents and forming companies to sue.
While all of Joao’s patents are contenders, we’ve chosen US Patent No. 7,096,003 (the ’003 patent), titled “Transaction Security Apparatus,” as our Stupid Patent of the Month. This patent, part of a family that includes US Patent No. 6,529,725 (the ’725 patent), relates to electronic financial transactions. The patent purports to describe a new system for secure transactions that includes a step of obtaining authorization from the account owner. The claims are drafted in vague, functional terms with language like “a processing device” that “processes information regarding a banking transaction” and “generates a signal containing information for authorizing or disallowing the transaction.” JBTS has been asserting the patent against dozens of banks and financial services companies, essentially saying that the patent covers any electronic transaction with a confirmation step.
What makes Joao’s patent extra special, however, is the staggering number of patent claims. All patents end with at least one claim (the claims are the part of the patent that are supposed to alert the public to the boundaries of the invention). The average number of claims per patent is around 20. The ’003 patent, however, has an astonishing 424 claims: a seemingly endless list of small, indeed mostly trivial, variations on the same idea. The related ‘725 patent has another 340 claims, bringing the total to over 750 claims all based off the same application.
We do not believe there is any legitimate reason for Joao to include so many claims in his patent applications. In fact, it appears this is done solely to allow him to game the system. First, it allows him to raise the cost of defending a lawsuit—for example, in its complaints, JBTS doesn’t identify a single claim that’s allegedly infringed, likely to prevent a motion to dismiss. More disturbingly, JBTS has used the duplicative claims to continue asserting the patents despite multiple defeats in court. Each time the company loses, it picks out some new claims and asserts those, even though they are largely identical to claims already thrown out.
Despite the growing availability of legal services, unauthorized file-sharing continues to generate thousands of petabytes of traffic each month.
This massive network use has caused concern among many Internet providers over the years, some of which decided to throttle BitTorrent transfers. Interestingly, AT&T believes the problem can also be dealt with in a more positive way.
A new patent awarded to the Intellectual Property division of the Texas-based ISP describes a ‘fast lane’ for BitTorrent and other P2P traffic.
Titled “System and Method to Guide Active Participation in Peer-to-Peer Systems with Passive Monitoring Environment,” one of the patent’s main goals is to speed up P2P transfers while reducing network costs.
While acknowledging the benefits of file-sharing networks, the ISP notes that they can take up a lot of resources.
“P2P networks can be useful for sharing content files containing audio, video, or other data in digital format. It is estimated that P2P file sharing, such as BitTorrent, represents greater than 20% of all broadband traffic on the Internet,” AT&T writes.
To limit the impact on its network resources, AT&T proposes several technologies to serve content locally. This can be done by prioritizing local traffic and caching files from its own servers.
“The local peer server may provide the content to peers within the same subnet more efficiently than can a peer in another subnet,” the patent reads.
“As such, providing the content on the local peer server can reduce network usage and decrease the time required for the peer to download the content.”
This was widely expected, but Rep. Goodlatte has now officially re-introduced his patent reform bill, which largely mirrors the one that sailed through the House with ease a little over a year ago (in part because they took out some of the key parts). The Senate bill was a bit stronger and was on the verge of passing until the trial lawyers called up Senator Harry Reid, and had him flat out kill the bill, despite widespread bipartisan support. As we noted at the time, it seemed like the trial lawyers may have miscalculated, because it was already clear that the Republicans were likely to gain control over the Senate in the 2014 elections (as they did), and they were not interested in bowing down to the trial lawyers.
