Twitter Sued For Patent Infringement by TechRadium Messaging company. | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Sued For Patent Infringement by TechRadium Messaging company.

inquisitr.com

24 pointsolefoo20 comments

Their earliest patent was filed in 2005. Maybe I have a poor memory, but I feel like anyone 'skilled in the art' of web/mobile technologies would have anticipated applying and combining existing technologies in this way back in 2005.

There was a recent supreme court case - KSR v. Teleflex - that hopefully comes into play... http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2007/05/01/ksr-v-teleflex-the-supre... "Now, all knowledge in the relevant field — technical knowledge, changes in implementing technologies, consumer demand — will be available to show whether the invention was truly innovating or just the product of connecting the dots in the prior art."

If their patent had been filed 10 years ago, I could maybe see an argument. But 4 years ago, not so much.

Wow, one would have hoped that TechRadium would have tried to upsell their clients on the security of their services over Twitter. This reminds me of the company suing Google because they are offering maps for free. Twitter is a start up and this will eat up some of their much needed capital... TechRadium is trying to bully them into shutting down instead of trying to have a better product. Another example of our patent system gone awry.

I'm fairly sure that the owners and employees of TechRadium would disagree and say that they are merely trying to protect their invention and defend the business they've built on it.

This is not a case of a patent troll sitting on an idea and attempting to charge a toll from anyone who uses it without themselves developing it. This is a company that actually went out and built a business and spent a fair amount of effort making sure that they could defend it. And now they are.

and yet don't you think the patents are still vague?

I'm not a patent attorney, but to me, they seem to be completely different than what Twitter does:

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7130389/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7362852/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7418085/claims.html

It seems their technology is more push, that is, one person submits a message and their software will then broadcast it via email, SMS, phone, etc, and will even translate the message to a target language. Twitter is pull; it doesn't push. Other third parties might do the pushing, but Twitter, nope.

Also, the last two patents seem to be more business related, applying the first patent to schools and government organizations, which to me, is a painfully obvious use of the first patent (and in my world, the other two would not have been issued, but we're not on my world).

I agree, although I'm not a patent lawyer either.

The first claims of each of those patents states that there must be "user selected priority information that indicates a contact order for the user contact device" and that there should be "a priority order for contacting each user contact device within the group". Twitter doesn't do that, and all the other claims rely on the first.

It doesn't matter what I think. It matters what the judge thinks. And having been a part of a couple of patent processes, you are encouraged to make your claims as broad as possible.

The thing that feels... unwholesome about this isn't that TechRadium is trying to crush a superior product through a misapplication of patent law; I don't think they're trying to do that at all.

It seems more like they invented a hammer that's custom-designed to pound nails with a square head. No one has a better hammer for that. And then Twitter made a hammer that can pound nails with any kind of head, and does it good enough most of the time. Twitter just happened to solve a more general problem than TechRadium did.

It feels unwholesome because Twitter isn't really a system for sending mass emergency alerts to people. That just happens to be one application of being able to send short messages to a host of devices. And, really, Twitter wouldn't even be in competition with ISIS if it hadn't become absurdly popular for reasons that have nothing to do with emergency alerts. The feeling here of suing someone for getting so popular that an infrastructure has grown around them that lets them do what you do is, again, unwholesome.

The 'inventions' look pretty obvious to me. I don't see why this business should be protected from having to compete.

A slightly more indepth article is http://www.macworld.com/article/142129/2009/08/twitter.html

The technology they are attempting to protect is described here http://www.techradium.com/about/irisBrief.cfm

Twitter was apparently founded after Ev noticed the way people were using the personalized away messages on their instant messengers (as status updates). MSN Messenger has been doing this since 2001, and IRC has had /away for much longer than that. Seems a similar kind of service, doesn't it?

I thought it was the other guy who founded it?

Didn't Ev come in later on?

The patent is available at Google Patents. http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=gUR7AAAAEBAJ . I couldn't find anything similar to twitter.

This is a classic case of a technology company patenting something that is a very generalized concept, and that gives it grounds to be removed. If the patent really is distinct enough, they should also sue anybody who makes money off of email services as well.

There's also a patent for a video player inside a browser -- funny that nobody has tried suing on that one yet.

With Twitter's (annoying/undeserved/silly) high profile, this may finally shed some light on patent litigation in the main stream. A politician may even see this as his opportunity to show the kids how cool he is and introduce patent reform legislation. Let's hope so!

I hope so too. But then again, RIM vs NTP was pretty high profile too: we were talking about millions of Blackberries just going off line, at a time when they were arguably as popular among the movers and shakers as Twitter is now.

This was my first thought as well. In a way, this is the best thing that can possibly happen for software. It could be THE case that sheds public light on the ridiculousness of software method patents. If only patents weren't such big business for the government in the U.S.

Well put. Although European patent laws are a different kettle of fish.

Twitter has already been around and popular for too long for someone to try and sue now for the basic concept underlying their whole service. Twitter's defense will be that this should have been brought up before -- before they've put in a few years of effort and millions of dollars.

I'm afraid that's unaplicable. If it were, the whole concept of "submarine patent" would not exist —at least not for famous things, like theora.

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