Where Is Awarded "The Mother of All Geofencing Patents" | Hacker News Reader

Where Is Awarded "The Mother of All Geofencing Patents"

techcrunch.com

38 pointsdkasper12 comments

Damn, this is frustrating... geo-location is such an exciting technology - just shocked that one company can own the rights to so much.

Patents that cover ideas this expansive are so illogical.

It encourages innovation, you know.

Is that an opinion, or a fact backed up with evidence?

(Not being snarky, I would really like to know)

Edit. Oh yeah of course. wooshes self

Neither, it's sarcasm.

It encourages employment for lawyers.

It encourages hatred for lawyers.

I doesn't seem like it will be long before filing a patent here becomes the same as "write down something you'd like for the average Chinese to have cheaply that the average American must pay a great deal for or can't have at all."

I am not a patent attorney, but I am aware that a patent is only as good as the claims within it.

All of the claims here seem to depend on the portable device having a graphical map of the "geofence". The patent isn't relevant at all on a system that doesn't have this property.

So it seems that the patent is pretty limited to me. Any location based system that does not graphically show a boundary on the portable device itself will not fall foul of this patent (as far as I can see).

Agreed. This patent is not the mother of all geofencing patents: They seemed to have made it specific enough that it is actually not the egregious sort of patent abuse that we so commonly see.

A patent can have multiple independent claims, independently enforceable. In this case, however, there are only a few independent claims, each a simple rewrite that only marginally changes scope. The reset are dependent claims that are specializations.

We need to fix or eliminate this whole software patent thing as done by the USPTO. The whole notion of granting ownership over an idea such that it allows you to charge others rent for "using" that idea, and of granting ownership over some particular application permutation to whoever is the first one to submit a patent application on it to some particular office full of bureaucrats, is absurd. This is just the latest farce.

This looks absolutely trivial to work around. The claims require a "geofence" at a user-defined distance from a user-selected location, requires that geofence be sent to a server along with the device location, and requires the server to determine if the location is within the geofence.

So, first way to work around. Do not let the user define the distance of the geofence from the user-defined location. Use a fixed distance, larger than any reasonable distance the user would care about. The server returns all events inside that geofence, and the device filters it down to a user-defined distance.

Second work around. Do not send the device location to the server. Just send the region enclosed by the geofence (which can be used-defined). Let the device decide whether or not the current location is within the geofence.

Will this greatest flaw of our time go on forever? What could be the solution? I think world would be a much better place without software patents.

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