Patent troll says it owns GPS, sues Foursquare | Hacker News Reader

Patent troll says it owns GPS, sues Foursquare

gigaom.com

81 pointsalt_53 comments

The patent troll does not claim to "own GPS", nor does it make any kind of sense whatsoever to represent the patent by one drawing in the patent document. The drawings in a patent document exist for technical reasons, and are in no way a reliable representation of what the patent means.

What matters are the claims.

The first patent, US7475057, looks very very simple: it's a single standalone claim regarding:

* using a GPS receiver

* to populate a database

* by reading the GPS from a personal computing device

* when the device comes to a stable location

* sending that location to the server

* reading data about the location back from the server

* having the personal computing device request that the server save that information in a record associated with a user

* by using a system of detecting that the device has become stationary involving (i) reading the GPS, (ii) waiting, (iii) rereading the GPS, (iv) seeing if the location changed substantially.

This is a single claim; you'd have to be doing all of these things to infringe that patent.

(It's a remarkably broad claim and a dumb patent, although it was filed a fair bit before personal GPS devices were common).

This might sound pedantic, but I get tired of people referring to "GPS" as a mobile GPS naviation app. GPS refers to the entire system of satellites and ground stations. From this system, one can build applications on top of a GPS receiver, which provides the position. So yes, the patent troll doesn't own the satellites and ground stations.

This patent appears to more or less very specifically claim Foursquare.

I don't use Foursquare, just read the description of the service.

Does Foursquare use the very last step in the description? My understanding is they update location when user "checks in", not when system detects that the user's device is stationary.

"This is a single claim; you'd have to be doing all of these things to infringe that patent."

The NPE's are really just a more updated version of what personal injury lawyers have been doing for years. There is a leg to stand on, and it results in a shake down (in many but not all cases of course I'm not claiming there isn't infringement). So there are valid claims and there are bogus claims. Trying to divine between the two is going to be like filtering spam. Redesigning the system from the ground up is as likely as the same type thing happening with email and how that's currently handled.

Perhaps the next thing, while not as profitable, will be shakedowns with respect to trademarks. I actually had that happen maybe 5 years ago when a large bank (UBS) objected to a trademark filing and extorted a minor concession in order to let us have a trademark on a non-bank related business. Cost a few thousand in legal fees and delayed the trademark from being issued.

This really doesn't look like one of those "if you squint, virtually any web app written in the last 10 years could infringe it" kind of patents. It looks like a patent on Foursquare.

I agree, the patent situation is a mess. And this is probably a terrible patent encumbered by all sorts of prior art. But on paper, it's a pretty good leg to stand on.

It also looks like a patent on elements of networked fleet vehicle tracking, which has been around since the '90s.

If I've learned anything about the patent system, it's that it doesn't matter if you've been doing it since 1776- if they've got a patent on it, you better watch out.

If you personally have been doing it since 1776, you're fine. It's usually more like some obscure product by a now bankrupt company did the same thing, but neither they nor the product is currently available.

These seem to be becoming more and more timing attacks. For any given concept in software, it seems there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of overlapping patents on various applications of the idea. It might be a login authentication, a gps location or an in-app purchase. The point is, it doesn't matter. The actual patent is irrelevant. Trolls have something that's going to work, they just need to wait for that golden moment when a company just starts becoming successful. Big enough to pay out, but too small to defend well enough not to be easy money.

Perhaps we need a law firm that specializes in cheaply delaying troll cases long enough for little companies to build some defenses. Perhaps trolls are more like a manageable chronic disease rather than something that needs an immediate cure.

This is why, short of changing the way patents are issued, damages should be based on a meaningful metric like lost sales, or licensing fees, not theoretical damages based on a hypothetical product that was never, ever going to be made.

My understanding is that they can claim any amount of damages they want, but won't necessarily be awarded the claimed amount; and that their business model is based on people settling rather than on winning in court.

If this change was made, would there be a shortcut whereby the defendants could simply lose and have to pay close-to-zero damages, or would they still have to choose between "defending themselves in court", "settling" and "paying the claimed damages"?

I believe the claimed damages generally do come from lost licensing fees.

I wonder if recent cries for the government to reform patent law is pressuring patent trolls to hurry up and try to cash out on increasingly obvious claims. All shell companies have to start doing it, because their 'colleagues' are ruining the patent troll market with their own ridiculous claims and essentially running each other into the ground.

Interesting idea, so the more they try to profit from the crud, then the worse it looks, so more players try to profit off their own crud before their crud becomes worthless, and so on.

Presumably if that is true, there would be a threshold after which you don't have to keep pushing because the behaviour of the patent holders is doing all your work for you and the law gets changed because nobody wants to do business in that environment.

WHY have we not reformed our patent system yet? Is it purely because of the sway lawyers have over our legal system and regulatory system (and the inherent conflict of interest that results)?

Despite what people might have you believe, lawyers are almost certainly neutral on this issue. Lawyers get paid either way. The patent system is the way it is because it serves the interest of the real monied interests. Too, there is a legitimate argument that changing something so fundamentally intertwingled with lots and lots and lots of economic activity is not something to be done lightly.

Personally, I don't have a settled opinion on software patents. I'm much more offended by the gruesome metastasis of copyright into an finite but unbounded bludgeon.

The more contention and ambiguity (in the patent system), the more work there is for attorneys. It would be in their best interest to keep the status quo.

Yeah, but the number of practicing patent attorneys is very small. It's not really useful to talk about "lawyers" as a class when dealing with a very specific point of law, like software patents. It's not like changing the patent system will a) put lawyers out on the street or b) even reduce the overall complexity of the system.

The law is complex and difficult because it does so much, not by the iniquitous behavior of a cabal of lawyers. The only way to reduce the complexity is to throw away a lot of what we have decided is best handled through the courts. It obviously can seem perverse and weird, but the world is perverse and weird. Shit, even programming computers is an exercise in weird perversity.

This. There are some problems with software patents, but the solution is not to do away with them all-together. We as a country (and our founders in the Constitution) have decided that limited term monopoly is a fair trade for public disclosure. Exempting software would be an insult to software engineers, putting their work on a lower level than other fields. Let's change the discussion from the polarizing "burn it down" to "how can we do better?"

The legal system is complex, as is government, because it represents millions of opinions on how best to do something and has been evolving for hundreds of years. Imagine a 200 year old code repo. The original spec is ambitious in scope but extremely vague, the guys who started the project left the company years ago, and a few hundred co-workers give you vicious code-reviews. The project runs life support for 300+ million people.

Patent lawyers aren't to blame. As of today, there are only 30734 patent attorneys in the country, and only a portion will ever work in software patents. Sure they profit from the status quo, but they'd profit from whatever replaces the current system as well or they'd find work in other legal niches. The idea that there is a secret club of evil patent lawyers pulling the strings is laughable. If you want change, talk to your congressman.

I don't buy that. That's like arguing that janitors would have opposed the vacuum cleaner on the grounds that it would speed up tasks, therefore decreasing the amount of work available for them.

Or like textile workers would break into factories and destroy the frames invented to make the work faster and easier, calling themselves the "Sons of Ned Ludd."

Heh. Yeah. But remember also to get back to the original post, no lawyers would be forced into starvation if the patent system were fundamentally changed.

A threat of starvation could obviously make a man preform vandalism. Lawyers are not being threatened with starvation, but neither is anyone suggesting that they are actually engaging in vandalism. A threat to a cushy lifestyle can certainly inspire someone to act legally to protect their own lifestyle.

Few IP firms make a notable chunks of their revenue from litigation. Certainly not enough to meaningfully lobby against reform.

Licensing, clearance searches, opinions and the like are much more the bread-and-butter of serious IP and that would be unchanged by any proposed reform this side of junking the system entirely.

Because Silicon Valley doesn't traditionally have much of a presence in Washington, and there isn't a lot of outrage over patents outside the tech sector. Also, it's hard to change a complicated system in a way that doesn't break it further (as most hackers can attest), so it will move slowly even once the will is there.

>Also, it's hard to change a complicated system in a way that doesn't break it further (as most hackers can attest)

So what you're saying is we need to apply BDD to our legal system?

  describe PatentLaw
    context "a patent troll with a super obvious patent"
      subject { PatentTroll.new(patents) }
      let(:patents) { [mock(:bullshit => true)] }
      it { should be_laughed.out_of(:court) }
    end
  end

It might be partly that many politicians have profited from IP of one form or another, but few have worked in software.

At least in France we have a law stating that if a third-party patent owner fails to do something with the patent, the initial patent holder takes all his right on the patent back. No wonder why many lobby want to get rid of this to "have homogeneous laws in Europe"...

Not really a well thought out suggestion, but wouldn't we get a lot less of these lawsuits when there were a stronger defense mechanism in case the alleged patent owner looses? It seems that changing the patent system is a long shot project, but making it unattractive to sue could maybe become a quick-fix easier to implement. These kinds of digging-in-the-dark lawsuits are seemingly a by-product for many startups as soon as they get somewhat their feet on the ground.

> "wouldn't we get a lot less of these lawsuits when there were a stronger defense mechanism in case the alleged patent owner looses"

In these sorts of cases? I doubt it. Each troll shell company would just be set up with no assets to speak of beyond the patents-at-issue. And in the event of a loss, those would be left worthless and no practical redress would be possible. (They're not far from that already. The only difference would be a smaller patent portfolio for each shell company.)

Any work-around for that --say, requiring some sort of bond up-front by the patent owner that might be recouped by the defendant to offset legal fees-- would hit legit inventors and small companies much harder than trolls. The system would be tilted even further away from serving anyone but massive corporations.

From over here in the UK, the quickest fix would be a central patents court with expert judges and qualified patent lawyers.

I'm not sure if a central patents court would necessarily fix things. The US already has a central patent appeals court ('the Federal Circuit'), and if anything, it has strengthened the rights of patent holders during the time it has been in existence.

Cause Foursquare are the only ones using the features in question. NO way that any larger companies will side with Foursquare to squash this before it gets traction.

I hope.

I haven't fully reviewed the patents in question, but the oldest looks to have a filing date of sometime in late 2000. I would think that there has to be some prior art out there for many of the claims of this patent. For example, the sport of geocaching was founded in May 2000, and people pretty quickly started writing software applications to assist in finding caches.

oh there is prior art. the military used GPS way before 2000

The patents aren't on GPS; they're on obvious uses of GPS. (In both cases, the entire technical value of the patent could fit in a single Tweet.)

This is going to fail the test for triviality.

Interesting, my company I work at is based entirely on GPS... Wonder if this could affect us.

Not unless your company is worth around $1 billion.

I'd say about 500mil... We're a relatively young company still.

should call up drew curtis http://www.ted.com/talks/drew_curtis_how_i_beat_a_patent_tro...

I just wondered if it would be possible for a company to sign something saying that they will not accept any settlement (larger than $0) with the other company (and that if they do they'll have to give an obscenely large amount of money to someone else). Since patent trolls don't usually want to go to court, precommitment should be enough for them to drop the case most of the time.

Intellectual Ventures shell company again?

As well as reforming the rules under which a patent is granted, we should also double the pay of patent examiners, then make them professionally part-liable for court costs arising from the granting of illegitimate monopolies in the form of invalid patents.

This is a terrible idea. If you read the AMA from the patent examiner on reddit, he described that an shitty patent passes because, even though its obvious to the examiner, they can't mark it as bad unless there is prior art that they can find. They can't conduct exhaustive searches for these prior arts and if they can't find prior art then they have to validate the patent.

We need to change the system from the ground up. Not start to make liable some poor fella who happens to work at the USPTO who would have no idea that a legitimate patent would cause a multi-million dollar case.

That's why you have to change the rules first. It should require a much higher level of innovation to qualify for patent protection. And if we are going to grant temporary monopolies, then there should be the relevant resources to keep the system honest, otherwise it is just massive economic friction.

The idea of part-liability for examiners on costs is so that the liability of a particular examiner is limited and is decided in the court and covered by professional insurance, much like an architect, so it is not going to bankrupt you, but getting too many of them could ruin your career and it is automatically on public record.

I think the federal government would disagree with assertions of private ownership of the GPS system....

Which is why the patent at issue does not claim ownership of GPS. It claims ownership of a different method of location detection, somewhat similar to the non-GPS system that Google and Apple use.

This article has been flagged for being incorrect and linkbaity. Who would have thought that the quality of GigaOm would actually fall below that of PandoDaily?

Both of the patents mention using GPS as components. For example:

http://www.google.com/patents/US7343165

It covers a system for sharing information about users (e.g. location, how to contact them) who have GPS-equipped phones that transmit location and some other information back to a central server. There's also some tomfoolery in there about how the server needs to store data for different users at different memory locations, but that's not particularly relevant or interesting, and frankly looks like obscurantist padding meant to make the patent seem more specific and novel than it really is.

It does seem to cover what Foursquare does. Of course, it does this by being obvious, and not in any way advancing the state of the art. I can't think of any good argument for why the patent system should cover things like this, and yet here it is.

EDIT: The other patent is similarly obvious. It's short, so check out the claims:

http://www.google.com/patents/US7475057

This patent uses GPS:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=FKuoAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...

"Ownership" is a big stretch but not as big of a stretch as this being a patentable idea.

Guys, I clearly said the article does not claim ownership of GPS. It can't, because the federal government was using GPS for that for a decade or two before the system was opened up to the private.

What is covered by the patent is other aspects of location tracking, specifically at issue here, the use of a central database to store detected locations and to make use of detected locations for other purposes. In this context, the patent claims any form of geo-location technology which is used to contribute to that database.

Well, the first patent most certainly does use GPS for location. The server is used to retrieve information about that location.

Claims 1. A method, using a personal computer device having a GPS receiver, of populating a database comprising:

determining, by the personal computer device using its GPS receiver, a location at which the personal computer device becomes relatively immobile;

(rest of claim 1 ommited)

I do not appreciate editorializing in titles. Don't slur some organization as a "troll", tell me what, exactly, they are doing that might be objectionable.

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